BEYOND THE BINARY: A STUDY OF
THE FICTION OF WILLIAM GOLDING
THESIS
Submitted to Kumaun University, Nainital
For the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in English
By
Prakash Bhadury
Under the supervision
of
Professor Syed Ali Hamid
Department of English,
Kumaon University,
S.S.J. Campus, Almora.
Faculty of Arts
Kumaun University, Nainital.
2013
Syed Ali Hamid
Department of English
Professor
Kumaun University,
S.S.J. Campus,
Almora-263601
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis entitled “Beyond the
Binary: A Study of the Fiction of William Golding” submitted
by Mr. Prakash Bhadury, embodies original work of the candidate
and that he has worked under my supervision for the required
period.
It is also certified that the candidate has fulfilled the
requirement of attendance in the Department of English as per
Kumaun University rules.
Place: Almora
Dated: March, 2013
(Syed Ali Hamid)
Supervisor
DECLARATION
I hereby declare that the Ph.D. thesis entitled “Beyond the
Binary: A Study of the Fiction of William Golding”, being
submitted by me, embodies my original work and to the best of my
knowledge, it has not been submitted in part or full, to any other
university/institution earlier. All the sources used in the thesis, have
been duly cited and acknowledged by me. If I am found guilty of
plagiarism, the responsibility of the same shall be solely mine.
Place: Almora
Date: March, 2013
(PRAKASH BHADURY)
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ii
ABBREVIATION
v
CHAPTER
PAGES
I.
INTRODUCTION
1
II.
GOLDING’S ONTOLOGICAL SEARCH
44
III.
THEURIGISM IN GOLDING’S FICTION
89
IV.
GOLDING’S PANOPTIC VISION
131
V.
BEYOND THE BINARY
172
VI.
CONCLUSION
217
ii PREFACE
The focus of this thesis is on Golding's vision of the world and the
way in which human beings are unfolded by quite a few basic techniques of
shifting point of view, differing symbols and metaphors that run through all
his fiction as a unifying artistic genius. At the outset, the development of the
English novel in the twentieth century and Golding’s distinct position as a
religious novelist in the contemporary literary milieu are discussed. An
attempt is made to show that his fiction abounds with binary oppositions
e.g. good and evil, rational and spiritual and their ontological analysis is
made to arrive at author’s different perspectives as a Theurgist leading to
the thesis statement.
The author was haunted by ontological deliberations and for him the
idea of ontology is that human beings must remain intransigent in the face
of accepted beliefs and insist upon alternative perspectives beneath the
surface of contemporary clichés. Mostly, one common theme that underlies
all his fiction is that man is always likely to revert back to primitive nature
as naturally as any other natural phenomena in the world. Characters reflect
the embodiment of a type of larger human species while laying bare their
original nature and thus, universal pessimist turns out as a cosmic optimist.
His capacity for ‘fictional kinesthesia’ is analyzed as to how he drives home
his point through shifting points of view. As an intuitive moralist and
theurgist he sets out to show the conception of man and souls or essences
stripped of all earthy trapping.
Theurgy, usually, is the practice of trying to gain the knowledge and
conversation of one's Higher Self, or Inner God and Golding while showing
the regression in the present day Godless world, ushers in the way to the
transformation of the world via the individual souls to God’s timeless
presence. A religious mythopoeia is constructed in the background of
iii spiritual void and moral relativism of the post–war era while showing as a
true evolutionist that the secret of evolution is the manifestation of
perfection which is already in every being. A comprehensive survey shows
that a pantheistic belief is insisted on toward attaining the mythic powers of
perception for uniting the trinity of head, heart, and soul so that the whole
man is born, who alone could be capable of right faculty of judgment and
could avoid any distortions common to limited beings and this has formed
the panoptic vision of the author.
The fictional world of Golding is a perfect microcosm of the
macrocosm. Man in his microcosmic world seeks a pattern and order and
faces a natural chaos of existence in his struggle with the world and with the
being. The chaos manifests itself around a double view, a basic dialectic of
opposing ideologies and in various forms of moral evil resulting from
irrational scientific progressivism. Panoptic vision is to break down all
illusions and his creed is – ‘know yourself’. Hence, self–knowledge, the
knowledge of the binary world with the natural chaos of existence, the idea
of unity, is the only hope for humanity.
In all Golding’s fiction the basic dialectic, the conflict between the
rational and the irrational elements in man’s nature—have been dramatized,
but Golding has gone beyond Marx, Freud and Darwin of western thought
and often his world of binary opposites slide into one. Beyond the binary is
beyond the reasoning bound in sensory organ. So, all the struggles in the
form of binary opposition or in any other form are only to realise the higher
truth that it is only one truth manifested as many.
Two antithetical forms -reason and faith- have always divided human
beings. Narrative movement in all the fiction centers around an ideographic
structure in which the two-narrative movements go simultaneously. The
author’s prophetic insight shines through all his works proceeding along
iv double narratives. Golding intends that the two perspectives are to be
complementary, not contradictory and the author’s panoptic vision shows
that the movement from ignorance to revelation is a continuous process that
brings the light of hope in the bleak landscape. The idea of unity is
pervasive reconciling the binary world. Beyond the binary is beyond the
world of Maya which further fuses into philosophical monism.
In writing the present thesis I must, at the outset, wish to salute one
common Soul that inspires, feeds, and animates the whole! I have had
constant recourse to the advice and guidance of my supervisor, the
venerable Professor Syed Ali Hamid, in completing the task and to whom I
express my profound gratitude and indebtedness. My only elder sister Rama
Bhadury, who I hold reverentially, has initiated me into thinking the lofty
and encouraging me into choosing the present topic of universal interest.
My sincere thanks goes to Professor V. Kadambari, University of Madras,
who helped me in getting the primary sources from the British Council
library and who first suggested the ‘Theurigistic’ view of Golding. This
research work would not have been possible without the constant help and
excellent services offered by the libraries of SSJ campus, Almora, British
Council, Madras and EFLU-Hyderabad. Two of My friends and younger
brothers, Prof. Kalyan Sundar Ghosh (NIT-H) and Prof. Sanjay Oli have
always been with me with all their support during my work, who I hold very
dearly. My sincere thanks are due to my wife who has freed me from my
daily responsibilities so that I can devote my whole time in research work
and deep affection goes to Sangbida, my lovely daughter for her inspiration.
Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my parents who have brought me on this
earth and encouraged me to strive for excellence for good.
v ABBREVIATION
Abbreviations used in this thesis:
The Lord of the Flies
=
LF
The Inheritors
=
INH
Pincher Martin
=
PM
Free Fall
=
FF
The Spire
=
SP
Darkness Visible
=
DV
The Rites of passage
=
RP
The Double Tongue
=
DT
INTRODUCTION
1 William Golding’s authentic fictional craftsmanship attempts to
unravel the modern world’s predicaments. His visionary eye and a subtle
intellect have embarked upon intimately related, yet a variety of panoramic
characters who represent every categories of human being in the world. A
binary structure runs through his fiction. Each fiction is inevitably marked
by the experiences of two protagonists; their journeys through life in
uncommon, difficult historical or geographical settings develop along the
lines of two different ideologies through which, eventually, the author’s
philosophical aim shines through. Visionary outbursts of the characters
crutch upon the fluctuating symbols and metaphors as conscious expression
of metaphysical meaning of ‘Being and Becoming’ while exploring where is
the bridge between the two world of rationality and spirituality, how an
individual character unravels the mystery of life and either moves away
from or attain to the point of where man and god subsume. The central
argument from which this paper unfolds is that beyond the binary and,
“behind the appearances of the material world there is a Hidden God”
(Beatson: 7).
An exploration of the man's mind from superficial consciousness to
the most hidden recesses of the unconscious depth is most succinctly carried
out through the genre of Fiction. It is a serious form of human investigation
on society and stands distinct as the ‘bright book of life’ (Bradbury: 3). A
glimpse of the genre of fiction during Golding’s time would contrast how
the author is distinct and his works stand as a classic in itself. Indeed the
word novel means new and news since its inception in seventeen century, it
has become a public literary genre with a question over its character: is it
realistic, a biography, a reportorial genre or a self–skeptical species of art?
Throughout its recent history it has seemed to oscillate in its function.
Sometimes it seems to express social or historical information through well
resolved plot and happy ending. Sometimes it seems to explore
2 consciousness and experience of fiction making process itself. These two
functions have always consorted and contested with each other. In the
nineteenth century much of the major fiction inclined towards the realistic
mode. In the early twentieth century much of it was experimental.
Henry James, at the dawn of twentieth century observed a split
between the novel as popular form and the novel as art.
A new
experimental avant - garde emerged for whom the established tradition of
art was over, the form exhausted and the age demanded something new. So,
with the mood of change and oscillation there came two different kinds of
novels: one is old novel, coming from the aesthetic realism and the other is
new novel, coming from new symbolist aesthetic of what came to be called
the Modern Movement. It emphasized other terms: “myth, symbol, and
abstraction, angle of vision, point of view and stream of consciousness”
(Bradbury: 4).The new novel or modern novel began to dispense with much
of the novel’s familiar realism. It probed deeper into consciousness and
pluralized awareness, multiply perception, ironised narrative.
Conrad,
Lawrence, James Joyce, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka - still
dominate our fiction today.
A good deal of modern writing possesses the despair and unease in
modernizing industrial society. After world war–II, the literary sensibility
in Europe underwent a complete change. The war tore apart the old fabric
of life that was known for its convention, stability and hopefulness. Unable
to reconcile themselves to the cultural and literary principle fostered by their
forefathers, the younger people experimented with utmost seriousness or
extravagant frivolity with new modes of action or attitude. They set out in
search of new styles within or without their native lands to redeem them
from their emotional sterility, spiritual disillusionment and moral
debasement caused by the war. The period of depression in 30s that
3 f0llowed the war further aggravated the tension caused by the disintegration
of political, social, cultural and economic institutions.
During the late 40s then, there was little evidence of any consensus
about a novelistic aesthetics upon which practice might be founded. “The
modernist experiment had passed by and the left–wing literary climate of
the 30s had failed to develop an adequate socialistic novel” (Sinfield 34).
During the 50s the ‘Angry Young Men’ and the novelists of hope began
their career as a ‘reaction against experiment’. “The novels has repeatedly
been drawn between the ‘journalistic’ impulse, which tends to make it
contingent, formless, and crystalline” due to the continued oscillation as
mentioned above. It further tends to lead it toward the dry consolations of
form, and make it into a “quasi–allegorical objects” (Bradbury10).
Novelists in the 50s lay in the shadow of both, to do something new. Angus
Wilson, Irish Murdoch, William Golding, Anthony Burges, Muriel Spark
published their major works during this period with different styles, subject
matter and genres with marked philosophical explicitness and by avowed
commitment to liberal values. These writers projected their personal disgust
with life and disbelief in God.
Stephen Spender remarked about this
generation as there was “an aroma of inferiority about its protest”
(Bradbury: 139).
Literature as a social fact of a complex kind began to implicate all the
changes and influences, itself functioning as an epistemological quest in the
changed world. The principal influence, however, came from the French
Existentialist Jean–Paul Sartre. His Existentialism insisted that all modern
ideologies- fascist, communist and capitalist were immoral because “they
regarded human beings as means rather than ends” (Sinfield: 35).
Existentialism became extremely influential in the fifties, especially through
4 attention of Camus and Dostoevsky. The overwhelming changes in the mid
of the century were all interrelated and they share a common ‘causality’:
The growth of an urban industrial society, the decay of traditional
religious fundamentalism, the dissemination of scientific method;
moral uncertainty technological advance, the artificial retreat to
primitivism,
development
the
of
flourishing
neuroses
psychology
and
which
facilitated
the
psychiatry…political
propaganda…science fiction, rock ’n roll, angst the death–wish,
sexual
frustration
or
hysteria:
one
pattern
binds
them
altogether(Sinfield: 101).
In such a situation of despair and unease, in the widening chasm
between the individual and his moral and material environment, man was
forced to suffer loneliness and agony leading to the theme of alienation.
Samuel Becket rose to fame chiefly because of this ability to show man’s
helplessness in the absurd world. The protagonists of his Godot show a
sense of loneliness and boredom being unable to establish an identity of
their own. David Daiches observes the disillusionment and loneliness of the
world as: “Everyman is the prisoner of his own private consciousness
…Loneliness is seen as the necessary condition of man” (Diches: 8).
British writers began to contemplate existentialism seriously as they felt
themselves exposed to its very sickness diagnosed by the existentialists.
Post – war era and industrial revolution showed no concern for the moral
being of individuals. Novels thus continued to oscillate in the wide variety
of directions from existentialist minimalism of Becket to imagined world of
Nobokov, un-rooted from conventional reality. John Barth of America
attempted to recover a literature of replenishment from an era of ‘literary
exhaustion’.
5 Of the new writers, Golding has proved by far the most difficult to fit
into any overall map of the novel. “His books have resisted the labels of
both realists/traditional and modernist/ experimental” (Sinfield: 241).
Movement writers in 1950 like Kingsly Amis, John Wain maintained an
ambivalent stance toward social critique. Golding drifted away from such
mainstream critique, though he could not be neutral to the changed
circumstances in strict sense of it since he reflected the current situation of
the time in a different taste and recipe altogether.
A critical paradigm of Golding exploration necessitates further deep
interrogation toward synthesizing the body of criticism that leveled him
allegorical, mythic, satirical, political and so on. In fact, all such elements
are common in any great writer but what is enquired here is his going
beyond any limitations of the binary world amid chaos of existence where
seeking of a pattern is foolish and how his symbolic and metaphoric world
play the ‘Theurgy’ enabling the readers to a flight from ‘panoptic vision’
to’ beyond the binary’. In his major novels he deploys symbols, metaphors
and fantastic elements to show the limits of human actions. Religious
dogmatism and class is opposed in the Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors,
Pincher Martin, the Free Fall, and continued the same till the Double
Tongue. Golding claims that historically specific symbols are of less
important than an Aeschylian commitment to, “looking for the root of
disease”(Kermode: 55).Hence, he has used various symbols through various
characters and situations for creating his world of Theurgy and panopticon.
He was born in Cornwall in 1911. He studied both science and
English at Brasenose College, Oxford. He took the job of school master but
at the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Royal Navy in
1940. Soon after the war he returned to teaching in Salisbury. In the Royal
Navy he spent six years afloat, except for seven months in New York and
6 six months helping Lord Cherwell at the Naval Research Establishment. He
saw action against battleships (at the sinking of the Bismarck), submarines
and aircraft. He finished as Lieutenant in command of a rocket launcher. He
was present off the French coast for the D-Day invasion and later at the
island of Walcheren. He witnessed firsthand the terrible destructive power
of man operating during war, essentially outside the restrictive limits of
society. With war as his tutor, he began to view man, instead, as a creature
with a very dark and evil side to his nature. Golding believed that our
humanity rests in the capacity to make value judgments and the power to
decide this is right, that wrong, this ugly, that beautiful, this just, that unjust.
After the war, he no longer believed in the inherent innocence and goodness
of mankind. Golding once said that man produces evil as a bee produces
honey. Golding’s experience in World War II had a profound effect on his
view of humanity and the evils of which it was capable. After the war,
Golding resumed teaching and started to write novels. His first and greatest
success came with Lord of the Flies which ultimately became a bestseller in
both Britain and the United States after more than twenty publishers rejected
it. The novel’s sales enabled Golding to retire from teaching and devote
himself fully to writing.
After publication of his first novel Lord of the Flies (1954) with a
modest success, he made it clear at the outset that he was interested in a
different kind of narrative – one that has been variously referred to as fable,
allegory, and myth. He was preoccupied with something that lies beyond the
representation of individual and social realities. He strides beyond the
‘mimetic theory of art’, much unlike his predecessors and contemporaries
and was concerned with “larger, more fundamental and abstract issues that
may be called metaphysical and theological” (Dyson: 11). There has been
an underlying consistency of purpose, a sense that all his novels, none of
which repeats any one of the others, are part of a single-minded exploration
7 and exposition of the nature of good and evil. He tends to explore the
absence of god from the centre of man’s consciousness. The realities of
human behavior and consciousness are enacted through the character of the
protagonists in terms of theological statements. The form and structure of
Golding’s works are designed to concentrate the eye on the moral issues
involving the roots of being. There are apparently contradictory perspectives
but the contradictions for Golding are the symptoms of the spiritual world.
The characters are skillfully devised to experience the theological
statements: What is it like to experience the fall from innocence into sin?
What is it like to experience damnations? What is the root of man’s fall?
And what would it be like to experience atonement and resurrection? All
these questions constitute his theme. He tries to build a religious
mythopoeia relevant to contemporary man.
The focus of the dissertation concerns how Golding's vision of the
world and human being is unfolded by quite a few basic techniques that
runs through all his fiction as an unifying artistic genius. First, his settings
are distant and fabulous resembling the real world of virtues and vices and
in which there is always hope for humanity of a possible redemption. The
characters are so skill fully created that each one stands as the embodiment
of a type of larger human species while laying bare their original nature out
of an unreal settings.
Second, an attempt is made to show that the novels abound binary
opposition e.g. good and evil and their epistemological analysis is made to
arrive at author’s different perspectives leading to the thesis statement.
Given the somber purpose, symbols and metaphors have been powerful
tools to present the oblique truth against plane statement which
reverberates within as lasting myth, and never to cease its guarding light.
8 ‘Darkness’ has been his recurrent symbol which as a type manifests itself at
varying degree in different situations.
Third, major critical responses to William Golding’s fiction have
been focused to show the commonality of response of Golding critics all
over the world as to the visionary acumen of the author who under some
critical interrogation named himself a universal pessimist but a cosmic
optimist in core. His capacity for sympathetic identification with others
mind that filters through out his writing career as “fictional kinesthesia”, is
analyzed as to how he drives home his point through shifting point of view.
The end of each of his novels unsettles the reader for sudden reversal of the
point of view as if it has shifted from the protagonist to independent
personae for; he architects a panoptic vision through a new mode of
obtaining power of mind over mind to persuade the readers to self
knowledge, for regeneration and for redemption.
Fourth, the major critical theories that corresponds to the early five
major novels, namely, Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Free
Fall (1959), The Spire (1964) Pincher Martin (1965); one middle period
novel, Darkness Visible (1979) and his swan song, the Double
Tongue(1993) have been critically examined in the light of Golding's
ontological search
as it emerges from his writings and as it has
occasionally been articulated by the author himself in a number of lectures
and interviews which subtly speaks of how he performs an act of a
theurgist or as a sorcerer as Shakespeare is so called. ‘Theurgy’ literally
means divine-working. It is close to the concept of magical power or
sorcery. Golding creates a vision through his characters that helps drive
away the evil curiously mixed in the fabric of life. He is the sorcerer.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest contrasted with Golding characters. The spirit
of Ariel is in contrast with that of Caliban. The spirit of Ariel is celebrated.
9 There are similarities and consistencies in dramatis personae which
underlie difference.
Fifth, Golding -the most difficult to fit into any overall map of any
particular categories of novelists –is shown to stride beyond the ‘mimetic
theory of art’. The concept of ‘Organic Unity’ (Aristotle) is explored. He
was concerned with larger, more fundamental and abstract issues that may
be called metaphysical and theological. The theme he found of his first
novel is to trace harsh diagrams of human history.
Sixth, the analysis seeks to explore the way the novels create meaning
through its structured texture backed by interpretation and observation.
Major critical theories are explored and composted against Golding’s
fiction which churns out his thesis statement of philosophical monism
while reeling across different subordinate branches that support it
ultimately. A great deal of criticism is already made which are mostly
repetitive. Philips Redpath has observed that Golding’s prime concern as a
novelist is to:
“Make us aware of areas of existence behind or beyond man’s
rational being in the universe. These areas might be metaphysical, the
spiritual world, man’ inner nature, the visionary, or man’s intellectual
life in uneasy balance with his historic past. In his daily life in the
world of work and relationships man is blind or oblivious to these
areas. Golding’s fiction makes us see them, make us aware of their
presence in the universe we inhabit” (Redpath 12).
Seventh, His fiction, Written with various elaborate skills,
accordingly requires various reading theories as the occasion demands.
However, any discussion focusing solely on methodology falls short of the
discovery and elucidation of the theme of his fiction. Uncovering this theme
10 is not so easy as the author deliberately shifts settings and creative
techniques every time he writes a new fiction, as it’s done in ‘A Moving
Target’. His fiction contains fluctuating and complicated metaphors that
cannot be reduced to any integrated meaning. This is partly attributable to
his antipathy toward reductionism. For instance, metaphors of apparent
degeneration also have a connotation of regeneration, and vice versa. The
metaphors fluctuate widely in terms of characters; settings and context thus,
give his whole work a distinct search for the truth and meaning. A close
examination reveals that the metaphors fluctuate over a void within the
symbolic world. The characters endeavour to fill this void by some means or
other, but it ultimately resists symbolisation. The repeated processes of
symbolisation and its failure produce the
fluctuating metaphors which
characterise Golding’s work. This dissertation seeks to illuminate these
processes, mainly from the perspective of psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Major emphasis is given on a few fiction namely, Lord of the Flies, The
Inheritors. Pincher Martin, Free Fall, The Spire and the Double Tongue
Other works have been referred occasionally to substantiate my argument.
Lord of Flies (1954), the best known work of the post-war years is a
classic on moral allegory in which all human being can locate themselves
appropriately in this world and identify their true nature. He set the novel
on a desert island on which a marooned group of boys from an English
Choir–School gradually falls away from the civilized society and then they
regress into barbarism, murder and cannibalism.
The novel is not an
examination of the idiosyncratic nature of small boys but of the essential
human depravity. The island becomes a microcosm of the adult world. The
grim account of propitiation and murder on the island is re-enacted in the
greater world continuously. Ralph and Jack constitute two opposite poles in
a seemingly tribal setting of the island. Ralph and Piggy want to establish
democracy and order whereas Jack behaves in an autocratic fashion.
The
11 boys return to nature is not an idyll but a nightmare as the beast is within us
and if we allow the beast a free hand, we end up in blood shed and mayhem.
One day, as the story progresses, a ship passes by on the horizon.
Ralph and Piggy notice that the signal fire which was their prime
responsibility to maintain has burned out. Ralph harps on Jack, but the
hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the hunters seem to have
gone mad with their new found passion of killing and hunting. The
‘littluns,’ are troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and the band of
boys now believes some unknown beasts present on the island. The group
discusses the possible hide outs of such unknown monster. One of the
‘littluns’ suggests that the sea might be the possible hiding place which
frightens the boys ever more as it is difficult to locate it. It is followed by
the hanging body of a dead parachutist on the signal-fire mountain. The
twins, responsible for watching the signal -fire Mountain discover the
strange flapping noises from it. The boys make a plan for hunting the
monster.
Jack becomes an autocratic leader of the new tribe of hunters. A
violent ritual slaughter of a sow is organised to solemnise the occasion and
the sow placed on a sharpened stake in decapitated state as an offering to the
beast. Simon, the visionary boy, happens to discover that the head is
speaking to him as the Lord of the Flies with a warning that none could
escape him and he resides within him. Responsible Simon spreads the
message to all the boys that the beast is not external; it is within every
human being. But the frenzied boys kill him with their claws and jaws. Later
on, a fight of supremacy begins among the boys; Piggy’s glasses are broken
and a rolling boulder kills him. The conch shell loses its authority and Ralph
narrowly escapes death. He hides himself against jack’s tribe, feels
frustrated and terrible on the beach and suddenly finds a naval officer has
12 arrived to save the boys. The officer asks Ralph to explain the story of their
arrival there. The hang over is too strong for him to believe that he is safe
and he sobs for all that happened in the island.
Free Fall (1960) is set in England towards the middle of the twentieth
century in a rather shoddy and dirty place of rural slums, in a ‘deep and
muddy pool where others lived’ (FF: 112), where generations have trotted
and all is smeared with toil and trade. Against this ugly and inauspicious
background Sammy Mount joy, the painter, casts a retrospective glance over
his past life, selects and arranges his materials in order to create a
recognizable pattern which will give meaning. After his mother‘s death he is
adopted by the rector, Father Wattswatt. He is an airman, a clergy man
whose homosexual advances and eccentric behavior add to the boy’s
irrational fear of the dark. The glittering myth of reality and fiction anterior
to the cold world begins here. Sammy as an innocent child continues to
enjoy the rich vitality, a sense of community and a boozy comfort of the
slum. It is his Eden under the ‘twin towers of Ma & Evie’ (FF: 29) where
life continues but not uniformly happy.
In schooldays he recalls the darker side of his boyhood. At boy’s
school he moves in the company of Johny Spragg and Philip Arnold. Those
were “days of terrible and irresponsible innocence” (FF: 25). Under the evil
influence of Philip, he learns robbery and violence. He bullies the small
boys for their precious fag-cards of the King of Egypt. Philip is a clever,
complex boy who influences Sammy in doing wrong things. He plays upon
Sammy’s weaknesses and persuades him to spit upon the alter of the church.
He also witnesses the arrests and deaths of unscrupulous scrap–dealers of
the slum. Another important episode is his ‘trespassing’ on the airfield with
Johny to witness the tragedy of a plane crash. Then again they trespass into
the general’s house, a huge mansion on Paradise Hill, overlooking Rotten
13 Row. Here, the airfield and the general’s house carry a subtle warning for
Sammy as they appear later as the glimpses of hell and heaven and
Sammy’s pagan innocence is still unacquainted with their theology.
General’s mansion later appears as the hospital in which Beatrice is
confined. Sammy is innocent and unconscious against those corrupt boys
who have lost the power of moral choice. Sammy makes his character clear:
“I was innocent of guilt, unconscious of innocence” (FF: 78). Mark Kinked–
weeks observed that here Golding has gone, “behind Lord of the Flies and
Pincher Martin to show that there is an innocence in childhood and that the
child does not automatically father the man”( 173). Sammy next plunges
into his action of seducing Beatrice.
As Sammy grows into a self–conscious adult, he becomes aware of
his guilt within. He significantly observes, “Perhaps consciousness and the
guilt which is unhappiness go together…” (FF: 78). Once he is aware of the
guilt within, he determines upon a course of action that gives vent to it, that
is, to pursue Beatrice Ifor and possess her sweet white body. In other
words, “his guilt feeling take the form of sexuality” (Subbarao: 58).
Set in the Middle Ages, The Spire (1964) is about the erection of a
huge, 400 feet tower on an English Cathedral. Chronology is uncomplicated,
covering the incidents for two years as a linear narrative. It is told from the
point of view of Jocelin, through whose eye everything significant is seen so
that the novelist’s narrative personae are almost suppressed. Parallely, an
omniscient narrator is also present. Two narrative perspectives parallel the
movement of his inspired soul in the presence of his guardian angel as if it is
the warmth of a fire at his back while he sets about fulfilling his mission.
But ironically, the cathedral looks like a market place from the very outset
with ceaseless torrent of abuse and secular activities of the workers. The pit
dug at the cross ways reveals that the foundation of the church is week. The
14 conflict of faith and reason starts between Jocelin and the master builder,
Roger Mashion on the issue of construction. The workmen refuse to go on
for such a risky job without a foundation. Jocelin, out of his sheer faith that
the spire is a “diagram of the highest prayer of all” (SP: 20) forces the
master builder to carry on the activity. Water seeps into the graves and the
Cathedral fills with the smell of corruption. Workmen are beset with
irrational fear, hysteria, and one of them falls from the roof and dies. The
rumour of plague adding to their woe, turns the place into hell,”… in fear of
age and death, in fear of weight and dimension, in fear of darkness and a
universe without hope”. Thus the church stands desecrated and “this is the
beginning of Joceline’s premonitory feeling” (Subba Rao: 73).
Jocelin is disgusted yet he indulges in human corruption. His mind is
inhabited by the devil as well as the angel. He sees himself as “a building
with a vast cellarage where the rat lives…” (SP: 210). He condones the
sexual corruption of Roger and Goody for fulfilling his own ends of
building the spire. In Rachel’s babble, he learns that Goody is pregnant and
it can only be an act of adultery, for, Pangal is impotent. He deliberately
overlooks Rachel’s complaint, “so he never saw the astonishment under the
red paint” (SP: 98). Mark Kinked weeks comments that, “what had myopia
been before is now a deliberate act of exclusion” (94).At the bottom of the
pillar he finds, “there was a twig lying across his shoe, with a rotten berry
that clung obscenely to the leather” (SP: 95). This obscene feeling works at
the subterranean level of his mind what he wishes to avoid consciously.
Instead he hears the noise of justice multiplies during Goody’s abortive
delivery at the cathedral. “She was gasping and sobbing and there was a
kind of surging in her whole body” (SP: 136) during the childbirth. But
Goody dies leaving the “blood over the money on the floor so that the world
spun” (SP: 136). The blood money is emblematic of betrayal involved in the
spire and its implication is far too deep that speaks of the evil in the entire
15 enterprise. Jocelin does nothing to save her, on the contrary, he discovers
within his being a sensual cravings for Goody. Memory restores her
girlhood to him and he reaches out to her unconsciously; that is the identity
of the devil in him: “She came towards him naked in red hair. She was
smiling and humming from an empty mouth” (SP: 178). Both of them are
drawn closer and closer and “then there was a wave of ineffable good
sweetness, wave after wave … and then there was nothing” (SP: 178). The
dream girl had no face as Joceline never cared for her human worth. Now,
he does. He, even though bewitched by her beauty, entangles Roger in the
folly of adultery to keep him locked at Salisbury to complete the task. The
Patron and the architect are both engaged in colossal folly.
The spire is “Joceline’s folly” (SP: 35) and Roger Cohorts in his
folly. Roger is practical man, but his bitter experience leads him to suicide
attempt. He is reluctant to be involved in the folly of building the spire too
high but he is dragged down into perversity. Jocelin is aware of the evil as
the spire is “a diagram of the folly they don’t know about” (SP: 128)
.Further, Roger is enmeshed in Joceline’s connivance with Goody. He too,
has responsibility in the murder of Pangal for what both Goody and Roger
face each other “in anguish and appeal, in acknowledgement of consent and
defeat” (SP: 90).
Professor Boyd observes that, “one might almost say that Jocelin with
his arrows of love plays Cupid to Roger and Goody… He allows the house
of God to become an unruly house, that he himself becomes a pimp for the
sake of the spire” (95). Jocelin uses Roger as his tool (SP: 65) and leads
himself to his guilt. He is an outraged keeper of God’s house and not only
desecrates the church but also enjoys the sin of illicit love. Joceline feels
that he may be able to hold up the spire by sheer force of will but the force
of will lacks purity and appears to be a satanic will. This will power veils
16 his moral lens to see the heart of things. Jocelin watches Goody ashamed of
her desertion but he thinks that he has other important business than to help
her and goes on to justify that, “I am like a flower that is bearing fruit…
leaves dropping, everything dying but the swelling fruit…”. He is all set to
sacrifice human lives for the fruit of the spire. His ‘so much will’ turns into
sexuality; “the burgeoning sexual desire that may be attributable to the
disease of the spine he mistakes for the ministrations of an angel” (Boyd:
95).
The only comic play The Brass Butterfly (1958) and the short story
The Scorpion God (1971) reflect their conflict and both have similarity with
The Inheritors in their belief that change is inevitable, but its fruit might not
be as sweet as we think to be. Golding affirms his message that change is
inevitable for progress, but the progress must be understood in its true
perspective.
The interlocking story of Matty and Sophy in Darkness Visible (1979)
is set in a specific time of 60’s England to present contemporary moral
disintegration. The book is set in the age of ‘getting and spending’, ‘free–
love’ and ‘anything goes’, yet it opens with a fire-storm in London during
the blitz that speaks of an apocalypse during World War–II. Matty appears
like an Old Testament prophet representing a theurgist and Sophy, for her
sexual excesses and criminal behaviour, forms the antithesis of Matty
representing the black magic. Sophy must come to terms with her spiritual
counter part Matty but the later is sent on an exploratory journey to come to
a full circle from an apocalyptic London to his saintliness via the failure in
human love. Thus, he is Sophy's positive counterpart who has sought
redemption from the very beginning of his conscious life. The novel
emphasises more on ‘visibility’ than on ‘darkness’. Viewed in this way,
“good and evil are evaluations primarily based on perception, rather than
17 absolute moral values” (McCarron: 41). In this, Golding explores, as Don
Crompton puts it:
Those subjects that trouble and fascinate him most-the extremities of
behaviours of which men are capable, their propensities for absolute
good or evil, their endlessly endless paradoxical saintliness and
sinfulness. And behind these lie the mysteries of the spiritual world
that continually surround us but are largely close to us, invisible,
forgotten or ignored for much of most men’s lives(Crompton:94).
Golding penetrates and tries to see through the darkness and mysteries that
challenge explorers of the human soul. His work is built around two equally
spiritual characters, though they stand at opposite poles: Matty and Sophy.
The first part is devoted to Matty's ascent to Redemption; the second
explores Sophy's descent through outrage to utter damnation: the third part,
describes the interaction of average people amid the dichotomy of good and
evil.
Rites of Passage (1980), is the most successful among Golding’s The
Sea Trilogy won him the Booker Prize in 1980. The novel concerns itself
with some of Golding’s continuing themes: the moral atrophy brought on
by being encased in egotism, the way self centeredness cramps perception.
Throughout the three novels, the development in Talbot’s moral perspective
is perhaps the most striking of all changes he experiences. The youthful
intensity of his cynicism and ambition are both considerably diminished by
the conclusion of Fire Down Below.
The Rites of Passage is a contrast to the Lord of the Flies. The island
in the later is an idyll surrounded by unsurpassable reefs, lagoons and the
nature’s plenty. It is unnamed and delineates the drama of growing from
childhood to adulthood in the Garden of Eden. Edmund Talbot, a young
18 Englishman, on the other hand, takes a voyage for Australia In the early
1800s where he is to be an official in the colonial government. The ship
accommodates other passengers like a sexually debased sailor, the coquette
Miss Zenobia Brocklebank and the tyrannical captain undergoes a change of
his mindset during the entire long voyage. An innocent clergyman who
might be the adult form of Simon or Matty is victimized and made to
commit to suicide. Ralph, a mere child’s loss of innocence is now translates
in the adult world as regression from light into darkness. Talbot discovers
inner fear, brutality which ends the virtue of righteousness.
The intention of the Lord of the Flies was to look at the whole history
and functioning of government in one unnamed island. In a Telegraph
interview Golding is quoted of his assessment of man and society at large:
He wanted to explore the evolution of society, from chaos to
collective action, and show the origins of the divisions that civilized
societies in order to further collective good by the executive action of
the few. He was about nothing less than the important task of
showing how a slowly nurtured democracy can collapse in the face of
the lust for power, how religious instincts can be perverted into
becoming a cloak for brutality and how the competition for scarce
resources can betray humans into revealing their fundamentally
animal nature in the space of a few short months (Nigel).
He has seen terrible things to happen for human race during his own
experience as a captain of the Royal navy. His unique character Simon, the
visionary boy, was a symbolic Christian character. His interactions with
other boys are quite interesting as he attempts to find the root cause of evil
and he represents an elemental goodness and religiosity that is a necessary
part of all human societies. His nature as ‘the numinous’ is his yearning for
19 spirituality from what the present human race has unfortunately moved
away.
William Golding’s Double Tongue (1995) is an unfinished draft and it
was published posthumously after his death in 1993. Once and for all this is
the last occasion that Golding has taken historical support based on his most
favourite culture and civisisation- Greece. It is set in Delphi in the first
century BC when the Hellenic culture was about to be doomed by the
Roman attack. Golding could hardly accept that Greek values and cultural
practices would perish from the earth as he always considered, “Delphi, the
centre of the earth” (DT: 33).
The fiction is the last canon of: his final say about the world, his
writing career, his spiritual quest and his salutation to the inspiring Muse
before he leaves this mortal coil on the earth, the Gaia. Arieka, the ‘little
barbarian’ is Golding’s first principal female protagonist and also the firstperson narrator, inscribing her memoirs on stone tablets about her
octogenarian life in Greece under Roman ruler. Arieka speaks with a double
tongue as a Pythia.
Arieka’s narration of her life, oracular power and her sense of the
mysterious world reflects Golding’s own creative life and its mystery what
he affirms, "The heart of our experience (that of the novelist) is not unlike
that of the poet at his height. There is a mystery about both trades-a mystery
in every sense of that ancient word" (Belief and Creativity: 192). Setting
The Double Tongue in Greece in the 1st century BC is also quite purposeful
that reflects, “Golding's concern with the social identity of the late twentieth
century writer and the crises of contemporary fiction. Delphi's decline--its
marginalization by the demotic temper of the times--parallels the decline of
20 so--called "serious" fiction and "high" art at the close of the twentieth
century” (Find articles).
Golding’s Ionides seems to be a character of paradoxes, but it is Arieka
who is a round character, pure in heart and plays her role with him
religiously as a constant companion. Ionides is a cynic, an atheistic,
contriver while Arieka, arriving in Delphi at the age of fourteen, believes in
the Olympians, “all twelve of them” (DT: 136). Arieka possesses a power of
foretelling and healing what prompted Ionides to bring her at Delphi, yet at
the middle of the fiction Arieka at Delphi seems to be surrounded by doubt
about the power of Apollo or oracle where as Ionides, “self-contradictory
man and who invents speeches for her began to believe on the gods’ will”
(130).
Arieka understood well Ionide’s paradoxical character and his turning
to God was a farce or blasphemous! In fact, he was bent on turning to any
thing for the sake of saving the Greece and its cultural values against Roman
attack but it was the rationalist’s irrational passion for Hellenic culture.
Arieka, who felt that the gods have turned away their faces or she has turned
her back from the gods, now acknowledges the gods’ existence as a silent
worshipper, no canvassing for name and fame. Unflinching faith in Apollo,
the supreme God, enables her mystic experience. Following his unfulfilled
desire of saving the Hellenic culture, Ionides accepts death escaping into the
void, ‘not-god, not-man—nothingness’ (163). Arieka too faces the void but
she feels there is ‘tenderness’ in it.
Both the characters are in sharp contrast. Many critics working with
gender and queer theory are interested in the breakdown of binaries such as
male and female. Gender studies and queer theory maintains that cultural
21 definitions of sexuality and what it means to be male and female are in flux.
“Distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ activities and behavior is
constantly changing (Richter: 1437).Arieka and Ionides form a pair who has
been in the same flux in which binary of sexuality is broken; it exists in their
cultural values.
Arieka through out her life moves between belief and disbelief like
Sammy’s moving between the world of science and the world of spirituality.
Though she considers herself ‘muddled’, she is, in fact a flux of both
believer and non-believer all at time as having been caught between belief
and disbelief even as a Pythia she reverts it back to the oracle itself about its
own authenticity: “Ask the oracle on your own behalf! Ask the oracle if it
existed? What nonsense was that? A Paradox, was that what they would call
it? The void then. And the hexameters” (126).
This again has a similarity with Sammy’s understanding of the world
what he, “hopes hopelessly to understand and to be understood.” (FF: 81) or
when Martin encounters the black lightening on the ‘rockall’ and discovers,
“a thing—that which was so nakedly the centre of everything that it could
not even examine itself” (PM: 40).Naked eye can not see certain things; it
requires perceptual eye to see through the void. Arieka penetrates the void
when she says, “I saw him dwindle… I asked the god if it was possible for
him to live. And I knew what the god’s answer was, for it was the same as
my own. So, I suppose that at last the Pythia did indeed answer herself”
(163).
The Lord of the Flies unsettled the society of England in particular
and the world at large of the latent barbarism in the boys’ world and the
struggle between good and evil. It is no less magical spell that the book was
turned down by more than 20 publishers then; but now even in the 21st
22 century it is one of the best selling books as most of the universities have
included it in their syllabus. Golding is very keen in discovering the power
of evil and gross barbarism in human beings which is never without the
equal power of goodness in them. His themes and the framework of the
fiction are from uncommon, challenging situations in which people are put
to taste in extreme situations and then to reach beyond their limits. He
makes his statement against those who think that it is the political or other
systems that create evil. But evil originates from our own being. It is the
depravity in human beings that creates the evil systems. The man who
played such a great feat of Theurgy in his time in reminding the root of the
disease that the human race is beset with, is himself the most humble and
self effacing as he speaks with extreme humility, “It’s important not to get
carried away with all this stuff Nigel. When I wrote Lord of the Flies – I had
no idea it would even get published. I’m not sure Fabers were sure about it
either actually” (Nigel)!
From the Lord of the Flies to the Double Tongue the author has just
not delineated the conflict of good and evil in dross, stereotypical way but
he has shown as a theurgist how human being can guard itself. He focuses
on the backdrop of human compassion that the conflict between the
humanistic and the scientific, between culture and technology, and between
the spiritual and the rational world can function as a panopticon to place
human race in permanent visibility against any aberrations. It does not stop
here. Human being has to stride from this world of binary to ‘beyond the
binary.’ Golding shakes us through his myth “until we feel in our bones the
perennial agony of our species” (Pritchett: 46).
The Lord of the Flies takes us back to our lost paradise by the flight
of myth which is not some thing extrinsic to the nature of man but part of
the essence of our being. The meaning and implications of the fiction find
23 consummation with the views of Simon, who sees things inclusively in both
their heroic and their sick aspects and accept the day light and the night time
mood. The heroism as well as the sickness we discover not only in the Lord
of the Flies or the dead airman but also in Simon’s sea burial. While
Simon’s body lies at the edge of the lagoon as shown in flash backs and as
the night falls; an order in the nature, calm descended the way Simon
himself accepted the order in his search for truth. The way ‘the great tide of
wave moved’ (LF: 190) beneath the constellation is a fact that he has “‘got
back to where he belonged’, to a vision big and inclusive enough to be
‘steadfast’, to accept and order all” (Weeks: 53).
Structurally, both Pincher Martin and Free Fall use the same system
of flashbacks to unite and give depth to the perspective of a single vision
and both depends on the delayed shock–treatment. We come to know
Pincher’s death at the last line and in Free Fall Sammy’s psychological
conflicts are presented in the middle of the story. Beginning from the school
days to his adult hood he is in search of a pattern every time and finds no
bridge. But the differences are much more striking than similarities as “Free
Fall has none of the sensational purgatorial gimmickry… to explore
Christopher Martin’s psychology and morality (Monod: 5). Further, both the
novels expose the religious significance of man’s experience. Sammy
Mountjoy is a guilt ridden hero-narrator seeks the explanations for his
behaviour which the preceding novel lacks. He is concerned to examine the
“fall from innocence to experience, the beginning of perhaps irremediable
sin and the responsibility for it” (Boyd: 5). Martin blames God for his
wretchedness and nothing we see from his life that can be explained in a
more human way. The Free Fall with its detailed account of Sammy’s
childhood and adolescence makes such explanations possible. The conflict
of good and evil and its consequences are found within the human world of
the novel.
24 Narrative techniques in all the fiction place the protagonists face to
face with their multiple selves through the manipulation of time while
keeping the characters plausible and like the real world. Time shift is an
important feature. Sammy presents his events according to their order of
importance. Sammy looks back at his childhood in section iv to vi; the story
takes a leap to his school days in London, meets Beatrice “the most
mysterious and beautiful thing in the universe” (FF: 84), forces her to
become his unsatisfactory mistress and finally deserts her as soon as he falls
in love with another woman whom he marries later. Section vii finds him as
a prisoner of war in a German camp, being questioned by eminent
psychologist, Dr. Halde and on his refusal to answer in the interrogation he
is locked up in a darkroom. The harrowing tale is told in section viii – the
torments in the dark cell.
The question, “How did I come to be so frightened of the dark?” (FF:
117) enables him to answer a lot of questions of his child hood to his college
days. Section ix and x again elaborates his experience in the dark cell.
Section xi and xii use the flashback technique to complete the memories of
his adolescent time. He also chooses here the flesh over the spirit. The
penultimate section shifts him to post war period when Beatrice is in an
asylum with no hope of recovery. The last section reverts to the end of the
dark cell episode that discloses one essential fact that the terror of the cell
had been made up by Sammy’s own imagination and sick fears.
The time–shift is in keeping with the post–modern trend as practised
by Golding’s predecessors and contemporaries. Sylvere Monod argues that,
“the technique has some traditional weight and … is both psychologically
and morally convincing” (138). Human mind is much less methodical than
any form of printed material. Memory also never follows a mathematical
sequence. Hence, it is psychologically convincing. Morally, the quest for
25 guilt and responsibility is much assisted by the potentialities of such a time
pattern as he can focus on events back and forth, however remote they are
from each other in time and present them in right degree. In Sammy’s view,
‘time is two moods’ (FF: 5). One is an effortless perception native to us as
water to the mackerel. The other is a memory, a sense of shuffle fold and
coil in which important events appear in our mind first. As a result Sammy
gains more coherent result in his search of human relationships.
The search was of Sammy’s but the facts of his life are not of the
author’s as he has expressed in a conversation with Arnold Johnston that:
“Free fall was an invention. All the terms of my life were turned upside
down… I said to myself, you were in the navy, well; this man has to be in
the army. You are a writer; you will have to make this man a painter”
(Johnston: 58). The name of Beatrice is suggestive of Dante’s La Vita
Nuova; a collection of thirty one lyrical poems celebrating the beauty and
virtue of the damsel who marries Florentine banker Simone. Golding makes
Free Fall a parody of Dante’s poems as Sammy’s love for Beatrice is cruel,
bitter and for flesh against Dante’s story that describes a world in which
human love seems conducive to nobility, dignity and even holiness.
Sammy’s love exemplifies modern, ‘love in the mud’ (FF: 13),
obsessive and filthy. Sammy suffers from ‘wobble wobble’ heart in their
first meeting when Beatrice emerges from a girl’s training college. His
obsession and emotions are war–like as he feels: “I was in the gutter, sitting
my bike, willing them (other students) to die, be raped, bombed or otherwise
obliterterated because this demanded split second timing”. (FF: 82). S.J
Boyd observes that, “For the most part, however, love in Free Fall partakes
of the qualities of the modern world: it is dirty, cruel and violent” (66). Even
Sammy’s stranger father is also imagined to be ‘as specialized and soulless
as a guided missile’ (FF: 14) in the act of procreation.
26 The choice made, Sammy is ever more depraved, conducting him
down into a guilty hell of his own making. He is no longer able to behave
with decency with Beatrice even though he is aware of the vileness of his
own act. His love making becomes a crude sexual exploitation and Beatrice
suffers the one sided torture. He callously abandons her for Taffy, an
entirely secular creature, her first words full of violence and swearing, who
makes love with him virtually on sight. Sammy has found a suitable mate
but he has also given up Beatrice for a matter of toffee, for the merely
physical. In the Communist party, Sammy has experienced enough sex, “a
little furtive pleasure like handling round a bag of toffees (FF: 91) what suits
the name of Taffy better. As a member of the party he finds generosity, a
sense of martyrdom and a sense of purpose and his purpose is fulfilled when
he gets Taffy as his wife in a few weeks.
Sammy records that their behavioral world has real value. The lovers
demand for less and achieve more when “the mask in won” (FF: 105), and
now he no longer finds any metaphysical grace or light in the face of
Beatrice. His relationship now stands as: “the mind’s self – deception.
Certainly there was no light in her face…. Her only power now was that of
the accuser, the skeleton in the cupboard; and in this bounded universe we
can easily put paid to that” (FF: 128). Professor Boyd considers that, “his
fall away from the spiritual or Devine could scarcely be more crassly
emphasized” (71).Professor Subba Rao has compared Sammy–Beatrice–
Taffy relationship with “the better known love affair in fiction, that of Paul
– Miriam – Clara Daws in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers” (61).
In this case, both Sammy and Paul, for different reasons, experience a
lack of emotional fulfillment in their beloved companions. Both of them
seek the company of another woman in their states of insatiated lust.
Beatrice comes closer to Miriam as both have religious intensity and nun–
27 like innocence. Both of their lovers fail to achieve physical consummation.
Taffy and Clara fulfill their desire for flesh. But Sammy differs with Paul
fundamentally in his imposition of will upon Beatrice what the later does
not commit. Sammy shirks his responsibility and drags Beatrice down.
Where there is imposition of will on the being of another, there is little
scope for “the triumphant sharing” (FF: 123).
Close analyses of Golding fiction show that his characters are
Archetypal in nature. An archetype is a pattern from which copies can be
made. That is, it is a universal theme that manifests itself differently on an
individual basis. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that these archetypes
were the result of a collective unconscious. This collective unconscious was
not directly knowable and is a product of the shared experiences of our
ancestors. Jung believed it was:
Primordial, that is, we, as individuals, have these archetypal images
ingrained in our understanding even before we are born; Universal:
these archetypes can be found all over the world and throughout
history. The manifestation of the idea may be different, but the idea
itself is the same (Redpath 23).
Archetypes fall into two major categories namely, characters and
situations/symbols. Golding with regard to both theme and structure has
shown the nature of human being in general. It is, however, rationally
inexplicable as to why one behaves in a particular situation differently. The
school boys of the coir school of the same age group were diametrically
opposite to each other. Golding’s religious vision holds that man's nature
contains a mystery or ‘darkness.’ In all the major friction here examines
how Golding constructs mythopoeia via his role of directly or indirectly a
theurgist which is essentially relevant to the present age.
28 In Golding's view, contemporary man lacks vision; s/he experiences
fragmentation. Mystic height is a matter of vision through experience. The
fictional world moves through various symbols and the prominent ones are
void, black lightening, darkness and so forth through which the readers are
made to tread a spiritual journey through the darkly chaotic world and in the
process they undergo a panoptic relocating. The mythic pattern, remote
settings, shifting point of view, and an unusual structure make the characters
realise the truth of the world.
Further, Golding’s fiction carry mystical, theurgist, religious and
mythological elements all put together. The themes are about destruction of
civilization, the depravity of man, chaos of existence in a world of binary in
which attempts are made to find a pattern and a synthesis of the age old
conflict of good and evil. Myth is taken from Greek term ‘mythos’ meaning
any story or plot, true or invented. Abrams defines it, “A myth is one story
in a mythology-a system of hereditary stories of ancient origin which were
once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to
explain why the world is as it is and things happen as they do, to provide a
rational for social custom and observances…” (178).
Myth also extends its meaning as supernatural tales by authors
deliberately. Plato used such myths to explain his philosophical abstractions.
Around the middle of the 20th century myth criticism became a prominent
issue of inquiry among the literary circle. Golding’s myth is for the total
explanation of the universe. The plots abound symbolic elements which in
his works play the magic of unsettling the readers as to any fixed meaning
and imperceptibly they reverberate into the minds of the reader as
metaphors for the meaning of human existence. Golding himself, while
talking about religion, states that the word ‘religion’ is not enough to portray
29 what he wants to communicate: “I whish, for example, to promulgate
religion; therefore, I will be religious or mystical about it” (Biles: 103).
The mystical elements that occur most often in Golding’s novels are
around the binary of the good and the evil, and symbols connected with
these are also pairs of mutually exclusive binaries: angel - demon, light –
dark, pride – humility, spire-pit, innocence-guilt and also sacrifice, snake,
black lightening, void, Satan, death, vision, tree, will, vision, and others.
The symbols also directly relate to either good or evil and keep differing in
their comprehensive meaning and finally, a balance is struck when they turn
into metaphors synthesizing the binaries.
The Fiction of Golding has been interpreted in widely varying ways
ever since. During the 1960s, critics claimed that the Lord of the Flies
dramatises the history of civilization. Some believed that it explored
fundamental religious issues, such as original sin and the nature of good and
evil. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is also applied to it which delineates
that the human mind is the site of a constant battle among different
impulses—the id (instinctual needs and desires), the ego (the conscious,
rational mind), and the superego (the sense of conscience and morality). The
story can be read from a multiple point of view as Golding created a myth of
total explanation by sheer force of his spiritual power what he made clear in
different interviews and interactions.
Culture is the source of creativity and engages the most fertile
thinkers and artists of the age. Series of fiction of Golding is a new culture,
very different from his own time of post modern period. Postmodernism’s
central tenet is that there are no timeless moral truths, nor even something
called ‘truth’ itself. Truth is a factor of power relation. Post-modernism
denies the Enlightenment, as initiated by Immanuel Kant, the ideas of
reason, rationality, progress, and the universality of human being. Foucault
30 proclaimed ‘The Death of Man,’ as earlier Nietzsche had proclaimed ‘The
Death of God’. The Enlightenment shaped the idea of Modernity with the
leading role of the West and the idea of Self-Consciousnesses was shaping
through the means of science and technology.
The two great wars are the direct product of the triumph of
science and Golding’s period of writing itself is this post war period when
the impact of modernism and Post-modernism was being seriously probed.
Post-modernism filtered down in the form of nihilism, in the theory of
revolution and to the realm of advertising and popular culture in its ugly
form. Nietzsche predicted it more than a hundred years ago and it found
fruition among Russian extremists until the fall of the czar government
(1917).It has over the years dissipated as a cultural movement. At the turn of
the century the Communist world and the Marxism as its ideological soul
have broken down giving way to the emergence to a globalised world with
the new concept of nation sates, race and culture. Golding’s culture is no
reductionism and he holds an open ended view of the world in which human
being has to remain in constant vigil individually and collectively about the
facts of universe and cosmos together. In an interview he confirms:
“Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of
social man; that a correct structure of society would produce
goodwill... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had
discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that
anyone who moved through those years without understanding that
man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or
wrong in the head”(guardian).
Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to
classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread
31 unites his novels even though he has mentioned about the fundamental
pessimism that centers humanity. The subject matter and technique in every
novel vary. However, his novels are often set in closed communities such as
islands, groups of hunter-gatherers, ships at sea, villages, monasteries,
cathedral or solitary house. His first novel dealt with an unsuccessful
struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the moral ambiguity and
fragility of civilization. It also said that it is an allegory of World War II.
The Inheritors looks back into prehistoric Neanderthals race. But ‘the
new people’ who are anthropologically identified as Homo sapiens
triumphed over them by violence, cunning and guile. The battle centered
around the dichotomy of innocent and crafty, for the progress of so called
new people that culminated into two world wars and where the boys world
(LF)have enacted the same play .Thus, the progress is turned into the
regression of the new people themselves. Barbarism flourished only at the
cost of innocents. The novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of
Neanderthals, their social behaviour, and a symbolic language that knows
no evil, only love permeates. Their powerful sense feelings seem to
communicate in a telepathic way. As the novel progresses it becomes clear
that they live the simplest life with minimum needs. Modern qualities like
cunningness, greed, aggression, violence, lying, cheating, gambling,
drinking and so on, are just absent from their cognitive level. At the same
time their love for each other is too deep to express in any language. This is
he culture they created and the author’s writing it imaginatively is his
languishing for such a world of innocence! Oa is the lady at the center of the
clan who is revered as the mother goddess who brings forth new lives and it
can be contrasted with Golding’s concept of Gaia what he supplied to
Lovelock for the mother earth.
32 The principal male protagonist is Lok. He is the witness to how one
by one the adults of the clan die or is killed by the Homo sapiens. The
young baby is stolen by the ‘new people.’ Lok and Fa, the remaining adults,
are fascinated and repelled by the new people. They observe their actions
and rituals with bewilderment, not knowing that the damage is done by the
sticks of the new people.
The Spire (1964) is the building of a huge spire onto a medieval
cathedral church which is generally assumed to be Salisbury Cathedral; the
church and the spire itself act as potent symbols both of the dean's highest
spiritual aspirations and of his worldly vanities. The Pincher Martin (1956)
concerns the last moments of a sailor thrown into the north Atlantic after his
ship is attacked. The Scorpion God (1971) is a volume of three novellas set
in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band ('Clonk, Clonk'), an ancient
Egyptian court ('The Scorpion God') and the court of a Roman emperor
('Envoy Extraordinary'). The last of these is a reworking of his 1958 play
The Brass Butterfly.A Moving Target, the second collection of essays directs
our vision of the world about its impending dangers of man made evils that
originate from within. In 'Belief and Creativity', he writes about his
understanding of the world and his own theory and practice as a writer.
John Carey, Golding’s reviewer and the distinguished writer, sheds
new light on him. Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and
Golding's intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait
of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he
reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who
considered himself a 'monster', a family man, a victim of fears and phobias
who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination
above all things
33 Martha Nussbaum has argued that “human being confronts the ethical
dilemma that individuals strongly committed to justice are nevertheless
vulnerable to external factors that may deeply compromise or even negate
their flourishing” (27). The boys’ world in Lord of the Flies confronts the
same dilemma even though they were from coir school in England and
learnt the Christian values during their schooling. Situation made them as
what they turned out to be. She rejected the Platonic notion that human
goodness can fully protect against peril which seems closure to the case of
Simon. Whereas Ralph and Jack stand at opposite ends of the spectrum
between civilization and savagery, Simon stands on an entirely different
plane from all the other boys.
Simon is innately spiritual representing human goodness. He and Jack
stand at diagonally opposite direction, one is natural good and the other is
primal evil. The other boys abandon moral behavior as soon as the hold of
civilization ceases to be imposed upon them. They are not innately moral;
rather, the adult world which imposes the threat of punishment for wrong
doings, has conditioned them to act morally. To an extent, even the
seemingly civilized Ralph and Piggy are products of social conditioning, as
we see when they participate in the hunt-dance.
Samuel ('Sammy') Mountjoy, a talented painter but a directionless
and unhappy man, is a prisoner of war in Germany during WWII. Recently
some inmates escaped from his camp. A Gestapo officer, Dr. Halde,
interviews Sammy in an attempt to find out about the escape organization;
when Sammy denies knowing anything, Halde locks him in cellarage only
to torture him by other means as well, to find out the truth. Under the
pressure of the darkness, isolation and horrified anticipation he gradually
breaks down; in a series of long flashbacks, he wonders what brought him to
his current state, and in particular, how he lost his freedom. As a very young
34 child he was happy, despite living in a slum and never knowing his father.
He was adopted by the local priest and attended day school and grammar
school, where he was torn between two diametrically opposed parentfigures - the kindly science master Nick Shales and the sadistic Rowena
Pringle, who taught religious studies.
He also fell desperately in love with a girl in his class, Beatrice Ifor.
The name Ifor is otherwise, Sammy’s lust for her physical body as it might
be –I for Beatrice. Sammy as a student at Art College began to love
Beatrice. Beatrice was unable to return his sensual passion and he grew
bored with her and married another woman. After some years he found that
Beatrice had gone to an asylum having lost her mental balance. The novel
alternates these flashbacks with Sammy's increasing terror and despair.
Then, just as he loses all self-control and cries for help in the woumb like
structure of the cell, he is released by the camp commandant cutting a sorry
figure for torturing.
In Golding’s view, the human impulse toward essential goodness, or a
bent of civilized mind is not as deeply rooted as the human impulse toward
evil and savagery. Unlike all the other boys on the island, Simon acts
morally not out of guilt or shame but because he believes in the inherent
value of morality. He behaves kindly toward the younger children, and he is
the first to realize the problem posed by the beast and the Lord of the
Flies—that is, that the monster on the island is not a real, physical beast but
rather a savagery that lurks within each human being. The sows head on the
stake symbolizes this idea, as we see in Simon’s vision of the head speaking
to him. Ultimately, this idea of the inherent evil within each human being
stands as the moral conclusion and central problem of the novel. Against
this idea of evil, Simon represents a contrary idea of essential human
35 goodness. However, his brutal murder at the hands of the other boys
indicates the scarcity of that good amid an overwhelming abundance of evil.
But Golding has a different plan and argument which is religious in
nature. One of the primary binary conflicts what Golding has dramatized in
all of his fiction is the conflict between the rational and the irrational
elements in man’s nature. The conflict of good and evil in LF, on the other
hand, further accentuates by their struggle with the ‘beast’.
If Ralph and Jack are thesis and antithesis, their collision does not
produce any synthesis, rather, they drown in darkness and regress to
primitivism. Their fun and games turn into darker passions. Their dance in a
ring is clearly a protective ritual as it happens in tribal settings. Each
movement in that boyish world asserts the condition of man and the concept
of the original sin. They all fall into a nightmare apprehending the beast
either from air or from water as if it were a real thing. But the contrasting
worlds often slide into one blurring the dividing line such as the bridge of
Sammy between two worlds, Marty’s spiritual language through silence,
Arieka’s double tongue that speaks both the language of mortal and the
divine and cry of innocence by both Lok (INH) and Ralph (LF).
Golding is primarily a religious novelist. His central theme is to find
a relationship of man to the universe and through the universe to God.
Irrational faith, ignorance and material progress have obscured our vision.
The root cause of man’s fall is spiritual blindness which has made man
stranger to himself. His moral view that man is basically a fallen creature is
hardly inseparable from the doctrine of original Sin. This concept may be
disputable but what can not be denied is the depth and seriousness of this
purpose and the sharp reality of our response to it. Golding has made his
task to break down all false illusion: “his creed is that of the Delphic Oracle,
Know yourself.” (McCarron: 78).It is self- knowledge.
36 Simon was the only person who was armed with this self–
knowledge. He is by nature intuitive, introspective and other worldly. He
gains his insight in a vision or trance. He remains obscure to the hunters and
isolates himself in a forest glade reminiscent of a church. Frank Kermode
observes him as “Golding’s first saint” whom the illiterate would call a God
as he can not be understood by empirical science. He fulfils the traditional
role of a prophet by awakening us to the knowledge of our sinfulness. He
walks alone and stumbles on the totemic emblem buzzing with flies. He
knows it for what it is.
The Lord of the Flies is Beelzebub who is also known by the time of
the New Testament as the Lord of the Devils, a deity of Satan. Simon has
his strange conversation with him in the jungle. The head says, “Fancy
thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill!” (LF: 177). What
the head implies is that, “It is man who creates his own devil; the evil is
within. We try to ignore this vital fact and on the contrary Beelzebub, Lord
of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare him as soon
as we permit him to.” (Bergonzi: 81).
Religion belongs not to the intellect, but to the super sensuous plane.
It is a vision, an inspiration, a plunge into the unknown and something
unknowable by sense plane. This search for the unknown has been in the
human mind from the beginning of humanity. The same thing is found in
lectures and discourses of Swami Vivekananda which he gave to America
and Europe that: “There cannot have been human reasoning and intellect in
any period of the world’s history without this struggle, this search beyond”
(4: 216).Amid the natural chaos, there is harmony. Since the inception of
human civilization discordant sounds, disharmony has been its integral part.
At the same time notes of harmony has always played its tune and has
always been present in one or the other form.
37 Now everyone must do certain good to the society as we are destined
to search for the beyond, right from the learned person to the mulling,
puckling babies. Our happiness and misery go hand in hand and often a
complementary to each other. In an ocean, when a wave rises, it does so at
the corresponding hollow at some where. It applies to all other aspects in
our phenomenal world. A rich becomes so only at the cost of other poor
ones. Marxist theory of capitalism is justifiably true in this regard. The spire
was built by ill gotten money and Jocelin deliberately allowed prostitution
in the precincts during the making of the spire which turned into a diagram
of prayer and still now it stands tall with all its spiritual symbolism.
In the Lord of the Flies, the author has shown the miserable world of
the boys at the outset at the inhospitable island but soon the fortune smiled
upon them no sooner had they invented hunting and food gathering for them
that culminated in a democratic set up. The increase of the material progress
and utility has increased the want of the world and its thirst is never
quenched. Martin in Pincher Martin is an embodiment of his unquenchable
thirst for more, even to the level of god himself, for he defies god and
misery came inevitably to him who even continues to hold on his ego of, as
if, he is surviving .He was, in fact alive through his ego in non sense plane.
This world is never good or bad at a uniform or unitary manner. The
world is like rheumatic patient, which when correct at one place, the other
place is sure to be afflicted, curious though this phenomenon. The Darkness
Visible is both darkness and visibility. But how could these two binary
oppositions be together? Again, this paradigm set explains a whole structure
in which this phenomenal world exists. How do we open ourselves, in what
manner and mode? - is the prime question asked here.
The world, following the structuralist’s view, is bound by binary
opposition; but this paradigm set must not be the limit for humanity. There
38 must be a search for the beyond and it is implicit in the characters of
Golding novels. Jocelin, the protagonist of the Spire, built the diagram of
prayer over the pebbles tinged with illicit blood stains. The entire making of
the project witnessed the binary opposition. The spire still continues to be
one of the highest cathedrals in England but its walls certainly bear the
witness of so many deaths and toils of labourers. The cry of the illegitimate
child, born during its making, the wails and woes of women, may be
matched with the prayer by devotees who also cry for salvation at the
precincts of the spire. The loftiest and the meanest designs of human being
are present all at a time here.
His first novel, Lord of the Flies, dealt with an unsuccessful struggle
against barbarism and war, thus showing the moral ambiguity and fragility
of civilization. It has also been said that it is an allegory of World War II.
The wealth of progress is not in material accumulation, but in seeking to go
beyond, freeing one self from the limits of the bonds and this must be a
continuous process. When the captain freed the boys from the island they
just roused from their slumber that they belonged to civilized society. They
learnt so many good manners in their missionary institutes but could not
apply during their stay there. Evil is ingrained in us as much as the good.
We need to have the right instincts to rouse it and this is self-knowledge.
The differentiation is a matter of degree of self-knowledge in human beings.
Beyond the binary or any structure is not in any material plane or in
any conceptual world. It is something super sensuous, beyond even the
intellect as we judge the whole world from intellectual ability and from our
individual standard of perception. Swami Vivekananda may be quoted here
in this context that, “Every thing must be judged by its own standard, and
the infinity must be judged by the standard of infinity” (4:209).When we
talk about religion we tend to be limited as it seems to persuade one into
39 believing in some belief system or in some dictates. But it is not the same.
Religion is a question of being and becoming. It’s not a matter of believing.
Here, comes the question of ontology.
Theory of Original Sin what Golding believed in says that man is
born as a neutral creature, a creature who can be either good or evil
according to the circumstances of his life. He does have the capacity for
‘evil’, something universally condemned such as murder. In Golding’s
novels, man has free will: the choice to do good or to do evil. Because of
our inborn tendency to do evil, we find it easier to do evil than to do well,
and we don’t exercise our right to choose good as often as we might. The
theme of LF is an attempt to trace the defects of society backs to the defects
of human nature what he made clear in the Hot Gates:
Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social
man; that a correct structure of society would produce good will; and
that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganization of
society. It is possible that today I believe something of the same
again; but after the war I did not, because I was unable to. I had
discovered what one man could do to another. I am not talking of one
man is killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him or
blowing him up or torpedoing him. I am thinking of the vileness
beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian
states. It is bad enough to say that so many Jews were exterminated in
this way and that, so many people liquidated-lovely, elegant word-but
there were things done during that period from which I still have to
avert my mind lest I should be physically sick. They were not done by
the head-hunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the
Amazon. They were done, skillfully, coldly, by educated men,
doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them,
40 to beings of their own kind.... I must say that anyone who moved
through those years without under-standing that man produces evil as
a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head . . .
I believed then, that man was sick-not exceptional man, but average
man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally
diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to
trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international
mess he gets himself into (85-86).
The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of
the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or
respectable. Vivekananda affirmed much before Golding that, “Both the
forces of good and evil will keep the universe alive for us, until we awake
from our dreams and give up this building of mud pies”(7:63).
It is time to understand the age old conflict of the binary world of
good and evil, rationality and irrationality or physical and metaphysical
world in their true perspective with respect to our canonical scriptures since
ancient times to the present days with a contrast to the fiction of William
Golding and the endeavour has been to mirror his Theurgy and how the
author while making use of the historical facts and social realities in the
binary world has moved beyond it to the realization of
the unity.
Possibilities for diverging view points are provided to show that the
prerequisites to saintliness (Simon, Matty) are detachment, the willful
withdrawal from the life of the senses while doing the needful and accepting
the mysteries of life as it is.
41 Work Cited:
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2007.Print.
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Paul Elek P, 1976.Print.
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Books. London: Faber, 1986.print.
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GOLDING’S
ONTOLOGICAL
SEARCH
44 It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps
perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty,
vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite
unimaginable.
William Golding, A Moving Target
The word ‘ontology’ as dealt by Jacquette, has four established
meanings in philosophy. There are two intersecting sets of distinctions. Pure
philosophical ontology is different from applied scientific ontology, and
ontology in the applied scientific sense can be understood either as a
discipline or a domain.
Ontology as a discipline is a method or activity of enquiry into
philosophical problems about the concept or facts of existence. Ontology as
a domain is the outcome or subject matter as a discipline. Ontology as a
theoretical domain is a description or inventory of the things that are
supposed to exist according to a particular theory, which might but need not
be true. Ontology as the extant domain, in contrast, is the actual world of all
real existent entities. When the knowledge about a domain is represented in
a declarative language, the set of objects that can be represented is called the
universe of discourse (2-3).
The term is taken from the Greek word ‘onto’ means, being; that
which
is
and
‘logia’
means, science, study, theory.
Thus,
it
is
the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality as such,
as well as the basic categories of being and their relations (Wiki). Ontology
as a philosophical concept is a branch of metaphysics which is concerned
with the study of being. There are many concepts which are argued within
ontology - such as whether existence or expression of existence is the base
45 of being, how objects interact, and the manner in which an object is
perceived – which have been debated since the earliest times in philosophy.
A subset of ontology is the attempt to categorize all things in existence and
the expressions of existence in a taxonomical manner as scientists do with
living objects. The obvious problems are that: a) the definition of an object
or its expression is tied to its observation, which can vary for different
people at different times and places (their relationship to the object) and b)
everyone has their own opinion as to what constitutes a category, or even if
categories exist.
When ontology is spoken of it might be confusing with any of the
alternatives. On the other hand attempts have been made to analyze and
explain the effects of Golding’s work by reference to his themes, symbol,
metaphor, characters and point of view to base the judgments on his
ontological deliberations. Pragmatic view is also not discounted as Golding
used certain special techniques such as reversal of point of view, fluctuating
symbols and metaphors, uncommon situations and settings, and subverting
existing belief system of the so called civilized world.
Baker has clarified Golding's perception of ontology as: “He must
remain intransigent in the face of accepted beliefs and insist upon alternative
perspectives, obscure rhythms, beneath the surface of contemporary clichés.
Like Forster, he disowns all metaphysical systems and recognized gods”.
Here, begins the journey of this present chapter. He has shown a pantheistic
belief and insisted on attaining the mythic powers of perception for uniting
the trinity of head, heart, and soul so that the whole man is born, who alone
could be capable of right faculty of judgment and could avoid any
distortions common to limited beings, else:
We remain troubled and incomplete creatures: evolution is slow;
history, meanwhile, a tissue of mad charades. Human nature and
46 history are linked, fused in a single shape, while the indifferent
cosmos lives on, following its own rhythm, moving in directions we
cannot determine and toward ends we cannot understand (62-70).
Joceline determined to follow his vision of building a spire defying
all physical law what he calls ‘Joceline’s folly’. He ultimately built it solely
on the conviction that God has chosen him despite it was “twining,
engulfing, destroying, strangling" (SP: 187). It may be argued that he was
inspired by Satan, no God, as he defied physical law. Golding leaves the
readers to speculate such conundrum which is beyond human knowledge
and certainty. Ultimately, Jocelin achieved the miracle which is still
standing tall at Salisbury as a diagram of prayer and hence, it mustn’t be
Satan’s. History bears that a miracle is God’s domain. But his inspired
purpose could not be accomplished without committing sin. The fiction’s
imagery says that he was immortalized in the cathedral's gargoyles which
was bursting "out of the stone like bolls or pimples, purging the body of
sickness, ensuring by their self-damnation, the purity of the whole" and still
his work is like "growth of a plant with strange flowers and fruit…(SP:
62).Thus ,Joceline’s ontological search is his mythic power of uniting the
trinity and God’s miracle is right here and right now.
Golding employs a situation that is remote in time or space, narrative
tone is analytical and judicial and the actions of the characters are patterned
with human relevance constantly experiencing a hint of a larger design. He
defers with Derrida as he explained textuality as the condition of history and
textuality itself carries with it the potential of its own critique. He argues
that there can be no meaning inherent in the text without a context and
context itself is unbounded. It is this state of being ‘unbounded’ that
generates a perpetual difference of meaning (Barry 73). Applying this idea
to the philosophy of Golding, we can infer that his ideas are an integrating
47 process of the condition of larger human society since its inception,
captured through a medium of language. His writings must not be
considered as something fixed and given, rather, the very exercise implies a
process of selection, contextualization, combination and reconstruction,
connection and disconnection leading to certain meanings and not others.
Again, ontology expresses a picture of the world that corresponds to a
particular level in the knowledge of reality and that is recorded in a system
of philosophical categories characteristic of a particular period and
philosophical tradition. It was originally called ‘first philosophy’ by
Aristotle. In the 18th century Christian Wolff contrasted ontology, or
general metaphysics, with special metaphysical theories of souls, bodies, or
God, claiming that ontology could be a deductive discipline revealing the
essences of things. This view was later strongly criticized by David Hume
and Immanuel Kant. Ontology was revived in the early 20th century giving
way to phenomenology and existentialism by Edmund Husserl and his
student Martin Heidegger.
Phenomenology as a study of ontology is based on a certain
interpretation namely, that the phenomenon is not the manifestation of
‘something else,’ such as essence, but rather that which reveals itself as an
object
directly
presented
to
consciousness.
Thus,
Husserl
views
phenomenology as the intuitive examination of ideal essences, or
phenomena that has immediate validity, contending that the experience of
truth is self-evident and the contemplation of phenomena self-validating. It
emphasizes the immediacy of experience (Dejnozka: 7). The Double
Tongue opens with the memory of Arieka, the protagonist’s account of the
time of her birth in this world which may be argued as her ontological
realization as it is her self validating essences : “Blazing light and warmth,
undifferentiated and experiencing themselves. There I’ve done it! The best I
48 can, that is memory” (3).Arieka’s memory at the time of her birth is her
immediacy of experience.
The author is sharing his experience through Pythia about the state of
‘Being’ in the realm of spirit- no shape, no form - only a kind of vibration in
timeless presence. Time never glides by; time is an apparent perception. He
certainly expresses in connotative words his own ontological experience
through his protagonist in the same breathe:
It was a quality of , a king of naked being without time or
sight(despite the blazing light) and nothing preceded it and nothing
came after, It is detached from succession, which means, I suppose, it
may have happened at any point of time –or out of it (DT3).
Kant came close to in his pre-critical period, when he regarded
phenomenology as an introductory discipline guarding metaphysics against
the limitations and incompleteness of sensory knowledge. In his critical
period, Kant advanced the possibility of a critical science that would
analyze the value and limits of sensory experience. Kant argued that the
intellect cannot go beyond the world of phenomena, or the objects of
empirical knowledge. This theme in Kant’s philosophy subsequently led to
phenomenalism (Free dictionary).Arieka attains the same experience on the
instant moment of her birth which is beyond the sensory knowledge as in a
pre-natal state a child has sensibility according to the biological science, but
where one comes from, what was the state just before the formation of
zygote or what is the state of memory then are still inexplicable. Pythia
wonders:
Could I speak before I could speak?” and she herself clarifies ,
“Well, there is a whole bundle of knowledge we
bring with us
instantly; knowledge of what anger is , pain is, pleasure is, love.
49 Either before or very closely after that incontinence there is a view of
my legs and tummy in the warm sun (DT3).
He himself has called his book both fable and myths, and both term
point to a quality of analogical expression of moral ideas. In every religion,
as Vivekananda lectured, we find three parts: philosophy, mythology and
ritual. Philosophy is the essence of every religion. Mythology explores,
explains and then illustrates it by means of the more or less legendary lives
of great men, stories and fables of wonderful things. Ritual, on the other
hand gives to that philosophy a still more concrete form, so that every one
may grasp it. This ritual is karma (1:72).Patterned actions bear the images of
ideas and carries meaning apart from the meaning implied by characters or
didactical statements by the author. As an intuitive moralist and theurgist he
probes deeper to search the relationship of not man to man but man to
universe. He sets out to show the conception of man and souls or essences
stripped of all earthy trapping. His job as a writer is to show man his image
sub species aeternitatis.
It is universally accepted that the writer’s merit as novelist stems
from the deep concern for the spiritual values in a world which has lost the
moorings. Golding as a spiritual cosmologist is going back behind our
distracting modern clutter of physical impediment to search for basic truths
that have been obscured by material progress. Hence his intentions are
simple, though grandly ambitious which sometimes appear to be difficult or
ambiguous. But the ambiguity lies with the interpretations as his novels are
like long poems. The difficulty in analyzing his messages is only a pseudo
complexity and judged from the point of view of a spiritual cosmologist, it
explains every thing. Golding’s most impressive gift is his ability to make
character exemplify abstractions without becoming abstractions.
50 Golding explores moral dilemmas at the center of human existence
and he frequently places his characters to face extreme situations to suggest
a mythological dimension to their lives. The characters always move around
a double view and a basic dialectic of opposing ideologies. Preoccupied
with evil and original sin, he treats these subjects in a way that transcends
the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The nature of good and evil, as
Golding has presented, is so generalised and panoramic that unravels the
question what manner of creature is man? And make man face the sad facts
of his own cruelty and lust. Golding’s search is not Victorian nihilism; he
believes in human sense of paradise lost; he also believes in divine mercy.
The traditional Christian explanation of the nature of man against
contemporary existential attitude, the evidence of holiness scattered among
the fragments of our world are represented with rare technical ingenuity in
Golding’s books.
He believes the only hope for humanity is self
knowledge, attained and practised by the individual. In the natural chaos of
existence, he sought a pattern “without forcing artificial pattern on it”
(Kirszner and Stephen: 882).
Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of
Modernist mythopoeists. He intended to supersede a variety of modern
rationalist formulations and charged his characters to reveal unorthodox
morality. The act of sacrifice and blood shed are equally important in The
Inheritors which is deeply concerned as its predecessor with humanity’s
persistent attempt to locate evil outside itself. The protagonist, Lok, in the
novel is the representative of the prehistoric ape man who knows no evil and
his inability to comprehend the darkness of man’s heart, human corruption
exterminates the whole tribe.
The Pincher Martin , a dense, difficult book of a drowned sailor for
whom Golding himself provided a mental life line to readers in radio times.
51 Martin had no belief in anything but his own life, no God. The greed for life
forced him to refuse the selfless act of dying. He continued to exist
separately in a world composed of his own murderous nature. Having
drowned, his consciousness still tries desperately to hold on in a watery
purgatory.
His identity is fragmented, his ravenous ego invents a rock to endure
yet, deep down he knows that he is going to be annihilated by the black
lightning, the compassion of God. “Martin is fallen man – ‘fallen more than
most’; a type of depravity” (Fleck 53).He searched for the unity, the ‘whole’
out of the fragments of experience in the world of present reality and the
Darwinian evolutionary progress and first novel also traces the harsh
diagrams of human history.
Fictional world of Golding is a perfect microcosm of the macrocosm.
Man in his microcosmic world seeks a pattern and order and face a natural
chaos of existence in his struggle with the world and with the being. The
chaos manifests itself in various forms of moral evil resulting from irrational
scientific progressivism. In the evolutionary process man has progressed in
one sense, and on the other sense, he has lost his prime innocence. Golding
depicts man’s loss of innocence, his sense of unity with the fragmentation of
his undifferentiated consciousness. Man’s rise to consciousness is man’s
fall. The fall, for Golding, is a reality occurring not only for human species
but also artificial pattern of social order (LF) or in the case of an individual
as he moves from innocence to experience (FF).
He opposes the sociological view of societal defects for evil and
traces it into the individual human being. He begins his probing of
individual guilt in the context of isolated groups (LF&INH), then lays
greater emphasis on the role of self (PM, FF &SP) and finally, attempts to
integrate the consideration of self and society into a broader framework of
52 human actions and experiences (DV). In the depiction of evil and its
consequences the protagonists are always in a conflicting situation between
optimism and pessimism, but the novels are on the whole not pessimistic as
though they might appear to be. Golding himself has accepted that he is an
optimist, and his visionary fables with universal applicability restore the
hope for humanity by presenting the Tree of knowledge. It’s a matter of
choice or ignorance that makes for either good or evil.
The theory of good and evil is a major aspect of
metaphysics. It also underlies as of fundamental importance in all the moral
sciences – ethics, economics, politics, and jurisprudence. The relation is
more often than not is relative which carries its further contention into logic,
aesthetics and the philosophy of art. In the last two centuries the dichotomy
is greatly influenced by economics what substitutes ‘good’ for ‘value’ and
hence came value judgment for moral judgment. The theory of value as for
Marx, as with Aristotle does not deal with every type of good except
‘external goods’.
The contemporary concept has been extended to the
evaluation of every thing which men think of as desirable in anyway”
(Adler:472).
The moral atrophy of the modern world obsessed Golding. Basically,
his novels proclaim that man is a fallen being. He makes valid
generalization about the whole meaning of life by showing what is constant
in man’s nature. The egocentric version reality in Pincher’s mind is
arguably connected with the nature of Prometheus, the mythic hero who is
the God- deifier, and whose own life–worshiping identity gives meaning to
his suffering. Golding establishes Pincher’s Promethean heroism as one
more case of man’s self–creating egoism. Jocelin in The Spire destroys
precious human lives and builds a vast cellarage of mind out of his ego.
53 Nevertheless, the faith what he had possessed at the outset of the novel also
has its own meaningful place.
The Spire ultimately stands both in blood and beauty, declaring the
transcendent nature of good and evil. If Ralph is a projection of man’s good
impulses from which we derive the authority figures, who establish the
necessity for our valid moral action, then Jack becomes an externalization of
evil forces. As the island civilisation (LF) erodes and the boys descend into
savagery, the conch shell loses its power and influence among them. Killing
of the pigs is an atavistic quest as Jack exults in killing the pig and is unable
to think about anything else because his mind is “crowded with memories”
of the hunt. Jack’s excitement stems not from pride at having found food
and helped the group but from having “outwitted” another creature and
“imposed” his will upon it. Simon proposes that perhaps the beast is only
the boys themselves. Simon’s words are central to Golding’s point that
innate human evil exists. Simon is the first character in the novel to see the
beast not as an external force but as a component of human nature.
Golding described the theme of Lord of the Flies as:
“An attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of
human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend
on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system
however apparently logical or respectable.” (LF: 250).
It is Simon, the Christ figure, who alone among the boys feels the real
nature of evil on the island, that it is not external but part of their very
selves. But his recognition of evil and all mankind complicity occasions his
ritual murder.
One of the statements of Golding in the guise of Arieka affirms his
Christian faith deeply and his realization of it convincingly. When his
writings were edited, much to his dismay, he kept silent as he knew the
54 limits of an average man. Yet the publication was necessary for the welfare
of all and the Double Tongue is an attempt to fill those vacuums which was
scrapped years before its publication. Golding is so exasperated as to come
to his tether’s end:
“I had believed in the Olympians, all twelve of them. How much did
I believe now after years of hearing Ionides inventing speeches for
me? How much after years of inventing them myself? …Of searching
for a proof that all I had believed in was a living fact and if twelve
gods did not live on that mountain, they did in fact , in real fact, live
somewhere
,
in
some
other
mode,
on
a
far
greater
mountain?”(DT136).
This also reminds us Christ’s sermon on the mountain in which Christ was
surrounded by twelve of His representative saints who were god-like
reflecting the same Christian values. Golding was blessed by that divine
power to speak his utterances and its concoction certainly dilutes the
essence. What is the difference between Golding and a common person is a
matter of degree of perception and it always varies from person to person
and Arieka, in the context of slavery answers it, “What I am looking for is a
phrase…Yes I remember. It is a question of degree” (DT139). Slavery, for
her, is limitation of freedom, but otherwise, all human beings are one or the
other ways slaves, she argues: “You could in any case say that we are all
slaves of the gods or the idea of the gods, or subject, if it comes to that, to
the law” (DT139).
An assessment of the Free Fall purely on religious sense is to impose
a pattern on the essential mystery of things, of Sammy’s life. It is already
observed that social factors are greatly responsible for Sammy’s fall. His
science teacher views his sin not as a damning mortal sin freely entered into
but regards it as an understandable human error by an immature young man.
55 In a Godless world of atoms and forces we have not yet understood the
mystery of the universe. We all have free will yet nowhere have we found
God wants us to fall. But Sammy after all feels guilty for what Nick can not
shirk of his responsibility. Judging from Miss Pringle’s point of view, she
has much to share the blame. Sammy defiles religion, despises and rejects;
Beatrice may represent purity and honour, but Pringle’s uncharitable
religious teaching has a great deal to incline Sammy towards his ruin. At
the point of Sammy’s falls, we see the gravity of his self-condemnation. He
discovers his panopticon himself and confesses, “For this gilt, I found
occasion to invent a crime that fitted the punishment. Guilty am I therefore
wicked I will be …” (FF: 232). Mark Kinked-weeks comments here: “guilt
comes before the crime and can cause it” (134). Golding wants the reader to
locate and understand the sources of the evil force in the pattern less world.
He employs a situation that is a remote in time, characters are radically
different yet representative and a narrative tone that is analytical and
judicial. The forms that Golding uses carry implementation both for the kind
of action selected and for the kind of character involved in it. Consequently
the judgment of other character who are exemplary, but not merely typical,
is necessary.
The novel deals with the limitation and the folly of the assumption
that man can control his universe rationally. Sammy, an illegitimate child, is
brought up in a slum of Rotten Rows and is subjected to evil influences
from the people around him. His search for a pattern is a Faustian metaphor:
at what point he lost his freedom and surrendered to Satan? Guilt-ridden
Sammy’s memory moves forward and backward, looking for the reason. He
dismisses his illegitimate birth, evil companions, membership in the
Communist Party – these were external and he was innocent then.
56 A central event of his is the recognition of the beauty of a girl called
Beatrice; later he subjects her to his lust and finally rejects her as a cold and
inhibited girl. The two worlds between which his life suspends is also
represented by a frustrated religious Puritan, Miss. Pringle and a science
teacher, Nick Shells. He examines his attraction to the rationalism preached
by Nick but decides that though the doctrine is incomplete, it was not the
cause for him to fall. Finally, he localizes his loss of freedom in his decision
to pursue Beatrice, what ever the sacrifice may be. He is blinded by his
pride and ego, the conscious human impulse to satisfy his own end. He
suffers in the prison camp by the psychological torments by Dr. Halde in the
cell, at the height of his agony he bursts out for help. He discovers in his
psychic terror mutilated penis, a symbol of his gross sensuality. He
surrenders himself and emerges from the cell as a man resurrected. He
walks into the world of vision. He finds no bridge between his two worlds
but comes out with a new mode of perception expressed by Sphing’s riddle.
Sammy’s world is torn with the conflicts of: body and spirit, faith and
pragmatism, good and evil. But it is after the transfiguring experiences in
his prison cell that Sammy as narrator, and we as readers, can look back and
fit the pieces of the puzzles together. Golding adds a conviction of essential
guilt which renders rational moral purpose of little avail. The climax of the
novel is Sammy’s responsibility for Beatrice’s cataleptic degradation. She is
the focus of Sammy’s guilt and thence comes his spiritual awareness.
Golding acknowledged a belief in original sin as necessary to any
explanation of the darkness of the human lot, and he knew what it meant to
experience the uncanny.’ Uncanny originally meant ‘mischievous’,
‘malicious’, ‘unreliable’, but already it was moving towards its modern
sense, strengthened by an affinity with Freud’s term. There was probably
some involvement, too, with the fear of the supernatural, ‘uncanny stones’
57 of Stonehenge. Emerson’s description of Stonehenge as ‘uncanny stones’ is
cited in OED as an early instance of the developing modern sense of the
word, which came to be more strongly associated with a fear of the
supernatural. Rudolf Otto’s book The Idea of the Holy describes:
“ Stonehenge as an instance of ‘the numinous’, a concept, some
maintain, that may be welcomed by people who avoid more usual
religious categories, but wish, as Golding did, to speak of perceptions
of good and evil that mostly elude description, especially in
rationalist epochs like the present. It seems likely that Golding would
have found these related ideas congenial (qtd.in Theophany).
But what eludes description of this dichotomy is as simple, yet difficult to
realise as Abhedananda
clarifies it as complementary, not antagonistic to
each other. It is to be understood in true perspective (7). Hence, Matty in
the Darkness Visible could manifest his divinity within despite his divided
face, divided life and a tortuous journey of attachment and detachment.
Golding holds that:
“There is nothing hid which shall not be manifested, and nothing kept
secret but that it should come abroad. He will utter things which have
been kept secret from the foundation of the world, as many of them as
he can: for this is what he takes novels, like parables, to be for. The
effort involved is extraordinary; he has grown more willing to discuss
it, but no more able to say exactly what it entails” (Kermode/cantles).
Golding’s ontological search has been from a limit to the limitless. He
has called himself ‘a universal pessimist and a cosmic optimist,’ what Scott
comments as, “Distinguishing between the universe, as the sum of man's
empirical knowledge, and the cosmos, as the totality of all there is,
including God and man. The fiction investigates the presence of an innate
58 evil in man underlying a veneer of civilization, concluding that man's
propensity for evil is far greater than it is for goodness. Often accompanying
this dominant theme is his concern with the questions of original sin and
man's free will, all of which help to create a fable-like quality within his
work.
Golding in his fiction has stridden from fables to myths what he
himself accepted it; but both terms do misfit as they bring reduction and
point to a quality that they are unusually tight, conceptualized, analogical
expressions of moral ideas in so far both the terms imply a degree of
abstraction and an element of the legendary elements. His fiction are so
patterned that the highly connotative symbols and metaphors that issue forth
from the narrative actions direct us the unfragmented knowledge of our
existence as, “one of Golding's most impressive gifts is his ability to make
Characters
exemplify
abstractions
without
becoming
abstractions”(Hynes:63).
Sammy Mount-joy wanted to mount in joy but he falls with the
question of his being and becoming, Ionides (DV) ended up being skeptic,
the validity of Ralph’s cry for loss of innocence is under clouds. Golding’s
message is that we are neither the innocent nor the wicked; we are the
guilty. We fall down, crawl on hands and knees, weep and tear each other,
but we can’t look at where we began. What are needed are a moral and a
spiritual evolution. He has endeavoured to synthesize flesh and spirit as
Arieka has shown through her illuminating reconciliation that both are not
contradictory, but complementary, for Golding yearned for saving the
mankind from its temporary eclipse what the Godless world of 20th century
is plagued with.
The greatest truths are the simplest and the most difficult to be
accepted by common people. Golding’s Lord of the Flies speaks of the
59 greatest truth about humanity, of both the faces of its ugliness and beauty,
innate human depravity and quintessential goodness, but the editors of the
Faber company could not accept it and Golding had to accept the correction
by Charles Monteith, the editor of the Faber, certainly unhappily, yet
nodded for the sake of publishing so that the world could have the taste of it
and he too fulfills his Aeschylian preoccupation. He compares his version of
the Lord of the Flies as Homer’s copy and that it was edited is made clear
through the words of Ionides while in the centre of the book room he opens
the lid of the wooden surface where Homer’s book was found and an
omniscient narrator says, “No. Of course it’s not homer’s copy” and then
the sordid matter of edition is made clear that, “A clerk probably did it or
perhaps as many as ten or twenty clerks, to make what we call an edition”
(DT 46). It was Golding’s oracle and it was, for him, “forgeries of our
oracles” (46)!
That the edited version of the Lord of the Flies could not speak of
exactly what the author wanted to express is made clear in the following
words, “Sophocles, Aeschylus-oh, any tragedian you care to mention. But
we don’t have the originals of them all…What we got back was not
originals but copies” (DT 46). It was too subtle for Monteith to understand
that, “The first thing to be said of Golding's novels is that they are selfcontained wholes beneath whose surface action and realism are to be found
much wider and, in a sense, cosmic meanings….”(Karl:254)
Homer, Golding mentions, could not write with the alphabets. Again,
we are told that the fisher man in the story of Perseus ‘didn’t know his alpha
from his beta’ (DT 48).Alphabets is certainly, the coarse sensibility of the
world. What a visionary author writes is much more subtle and layers of
meaning can be made which depends on an individual’s peculiar experience
of the world. To understand the subtle, one needs to attain the similar height
60 which he makes clear through the omniscient voice, “go back to your books
about books about books about books! We’ll be content with the makers”
(48).Hence, writing books on books might not reflect the subtleties of an
author and it might loose sight of the metaphysical or spiritual aspects of the
creative art in exact terms. Here, the new critical mode is challenged as the
New Critics regard a literary text as a concrete object. Its meaning can be
discovered without considering author, context or reader. The text itself
became the battle cry of the new critical effort to focus the reader’s attention
on the literary work as the sole source of evidence for interpreting it. On the
contrary, Golding puts emphasis upon the ‘maker’. It again reminds W.B
Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, in which the poet challenges how can the
dance be separated form the dancer! The similar example is given in
Vedanta literature regarding the ontological conundrum that the visible
world is the reflection of the infinite god, though it is unreal yet, it can not
be separated from the Supreme Being as the milk and its white color is
inseparable. Thus, the power of the mind that creates is entangled with the
creation like the dance and the dancer.
The omniscient voice very firmly reminds people, “But mostly I want you to
read the poetry. Particularly the hexameters. I want you to be able to speak
in hexameters. But, for now, all you have to do is read, read, read (DT 48)!
Golding suggested that it is not possible for the ‘philistines’ to
understand everything in this world especially the matters of spirituality or
moment of flash through which the eternal knowledge comes to human
being: “But I had burst into tears and seemed quite unable to control them.
Though whether I was sad or happy or anxious or wholly achieved or I find
it impossible to say” (DT48). It may be argued that to truly understand
something is to experience it but when that is not possible we must try to see
it through the eyes of those who did. It is in this frame of mind that the
61 reality of the past and our connection to it rather than its mere antiquarian
novelty is most likely to be recognized (Thorndike).
Ontological deliberations became prominent issue in the west under
the heavy pressures of modern scientific research. The western dogmatic
religion shook and stood spell bound where it needed to answer all the
doubts and loss of faith. It was as if a sledge hammer of empirical science
blew the fine, yet brittle, porcelain of western religion. The western
theology then, and it is still now, is at its wits end to accommodate itself to
the ever-rising tide of aggressive modern thought.
The intelligentsia and the common mass almost broke the ties with
the churches; people started questioning seriously about the life on earth and
its meaning. Ontological questions thus raised the maximum whirlwind
during this time. Scientists to litterateur came out with different answers and
solutions to the world. We still discuss Arnold’s wistfulness to Browning’s
robust faith.
Swami Vivekananda who is regarded as the greatest Yogi the world
has ever seen and who alone bound the East and the West with lasting
thread on Vedanta principle put the conjectures on ontological conundrum
in such profound words as to echo the sum total of all the searches since the
inception of human inquiry:
As in a universal sense, the primal state is a state of sameness of the
qualitative forces-a disturbance of this equilibrium and all succeeding
struggles to regain it, composing what we call the manifestation of
natures, this universe, which state of things remains as long as the
primitive sameness is not reached –so ,in a restricted sense on our
own earth, differentiations and its inevitable counterpart, this struggle
toward homogeneity, must remain as long as the human race shall
62 remain as such, creating strongly marked peculiarities between , sub
races, and even down to individual in all parts of the world (4:322).
Once we look at the various religions of the world, they are based on
some philosophical background, some rationale behind its scope and its
validity. But each religion having begun as definite dogmas could not
remain bound up as homogeneous entity of some defined dictates. They all
have, over the years, diversified into multiple branches and paths
.Assimilation and acculturation of multiple forms and ways fused into one.
A classic example is India as a culture that prides itself for its rich mosaic of
diverse culture on the foundation of Vedic practices, thus allowing its unity
in diversity. Accommodation of diversity and differentiation become
necessary for varying geographical and topographical conditions. The
process of such system of accommodation might lead to progress and
regress depending upon the bonds of mutual love and hatred among the
people. Nature is subject to change and the march of progress and regress as
an alternating factor has ever been going on till the differential plane exists.
Golding understood it quite clearly as he began self –loathing in such
differential plane what he answered beautifully in his last novel (DT). In a
Guardian interview with his daughter, Judy, we find:
"He was a very complicated man, with a deep self-loathing, which I
cannot really explain. It was not just that Golding was unusually
conscious of the incipient darkness in everyday life, a quality
exemplified by Lord of the Flies; it was also that, he refused to look
away. He was alert to the darkness and this came from the war”
(Flood).
The realisation of darkness was what the author was occupied to
transmute his private and personal agonies into something concrete in
linguistic terms through his writings. Nature, perhaps, makes it certain that
63 sameness is never met with for the continuation of the relative world, the
world of Maya and it is best exemplified by Vivekananda: “Yet it seems to
be true that the solidarity of human race, social as well as religious, with a
scope for infinite variation, is the plan of nature” (4: 376).
William Golding too was once thrown in this world to have his stint,
to be played upon by the nature on the one hand and an omnipotent free will
to act against this nature per se! In the first novel not only a small group of
boys was deserted in an inhospitable island, rather, the author situates the
whole mankind in a differential plane where all the types are always,
already present. The intellectual Piggy, otherwise comparable to pig’s
sensibility; Ralph the primary representative of order, civilization, and
productive leadership; the villainous, egocentric Jack as the primary
representative of the instinct of savagery, violence, and the desire for power;
and divine Simon are present as types all at a time. Ralph and Jack form the
thesis and antithesis in this world as they stand at opposite ends between
civilisation and savagery. Simon, a kind of innate, spiritual human
goodness, who is deeply connected with nature and, in its own way, as
primal as Jack’s evil, stands as the third front of synthesis what Golding has
endeavoured to prove and transmute his own self. The instincts of
civilization and savagery are not the same for all the people. Golding shows
not only innate depravity, but innate human goodness too or else, why
Ralph would cry for loss of innocence when rescued by the naval officer
while other boys sobbing? Further, his return to civilization is again
questionable as the officer as rescuer, is on his journey to human slaughter
during the atomic war. Ralph may still be transported from one island to
another island of atheism in absence of any sustainable moralizing principle.
This principle lies within what is made clear in his Darkness Visible.
64 In the company of Ionides and in absence of her mother Arieka has
always felt uncomfortable and drawn into her own self- a condition similar
to Sammy: “But what it feels like is a deliberate descent into the earth.
Down and down. Each time I realized afresh the enormity of my disgrace,
the depth of my shame; I drew myself in and thrust myself down, down,
away from the daylight, away from people. Also away from the gods.”
(DT22).
During the bridal journey of Arieka, which is comparable with human
being’s journey to eternity, the omniscient narrator says that, “there are gods
every where but allowing themselves to be sensed, as if at any moment with
a flash of light and a clap of thunder one would start into presence and
purpose and power”(DT 41). The way to understand the subtle is tough.
People require purity and the mundane world has all sorts of allurement of
power, consumerism and gratification of senses. The Pythia in Double
Tongue warns Arieka to observe certain self-control and make conscious
effort to achieve the highest path: “It is simpler to go with the tide…Be
strong and perhaps the god will not demand a torn mouth or blind eyes from
you...For the rest guard your virginity. The god himself will direct them and
woe betide you if you transgress.”(54).
Greece was the seat of learning and ontological search in ancient
Europe and has produced the fountain of knowledge since the time of Plato
and Aristotle to the modern age and Golding, a thorough scholar and
admirer of Greek literature has time and again mentions about its
intellectual and spiritual fervor: “Delphi is the centre of the world…In those
days Athens was the intellectual and artistic centre of the world. I want
them, both places, revived (56).
Moral behavior, according to Golding, is something that civilisation
forces upon the individual rather than it comes out as a natural expression of
65 human goodness what in turn make people speak in ‘double tongue’. How
different people feel the influences of it is a matter of different degrees of
perception. But Golding does not portray this loss of innocence as
something that is done to the children; rather, it results naturally from their
increasing openness to the innate evil and savagery that has always existed
within them. Golding implies that civilization can mitigate but never wipe
out the innate evil that exists within all human beings. The forest glade in
which Simon sits in Chapter 3 symbolises this loss of innocence. At first, it
is a place of natural beauty and peace, but when Simon returns later in the
novel, he discovers that the sow’s head, the symbol of Satan is placed on a
stake in the jungle. Offering to the beast-god darkened the paradise.
Darkness is visible within
Hence, it is not mutual antagonism, but acceptance of variation as a
means of fusion is what the author has realised and put forward in the series
of his fiction culminating in the Double Tongue. The ontological search for
him is the fusion of the dichotomy of good and evil, the material and the
spiritual while leaving each one to function at its own natural pattern as an
acceptance of all the differentiations which otherwise, moves beyond the
binary.
The question still vexes people about God’s existence or presence,
but Golding is pretty sure of and affirms vehemently through the words of
Arieka: “That some people did not believe in the gods was common
knowledge. But these people were supposed to live somewhere else and be
so outrageous as to be inhuman” (DT58). He substantiated his answer
through the common logic that the truth does not require its proof as it itself
is its proof or else, why Greece was different from other places in the
world? The omniscient voice delves into the heart of the question of
ontology:
66 “Certainly we all feared the gods. You couldn’t be sure of any god
being on your side unless it was small and personal as a good-luck
charm. So when I first heard a grown man declare his disbelief I was
not so much frightened as shocked and disbelieving in his
disbelief”(DT58).
Our belief lies in material gain. But god is beyond this petty materialism.
Arieka is a realised soul; so how can she accept such coarse judgment of
people who are yet to come to terms with the fine, the spiritual? Reply of
God comes through inspired muse as Homer, the author declares, was so
inspired! An inspiration is a hard thing to acquire but without inspiration
god-realization is not possible which is substantiated in quite simple, yet
inspired words: “In the olden days, when Hellas was great, the replies to
question s came in hexameter, poetry, elevated speech, because the
questions were elevated ones”(DT58).
The author sprinkled a little fresh water of noble thought at the root of
the already existing unity amid apparent binaries or perceptual variations to
renew it to a fresh life as a guiding torch of prospects in the temporary bleak
landscape. Golding’s boat seems to ply between the Scylla of postmodernist
fluidity of identity and the Charybdis of the deconstructionist unending
‘deferal’
and
never
reaching
to
any
fixity.
Interestingly,
the
deconstructionists may take a cue in what Golding had to say of selfknowledge.
The Lord of the Flies , rated as a classic in the literature of
disillusionment that grew out of the Great War, has been one of the most
studied tales in the 20th century and continues to be perfect myth that
reverberates with what had gone wrong with the humanity and the possible
way out .Unlike other political novelist of his time such as Orwell, who
upheld the political freedom through Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty four,
67 Golding was apolitical, non believer of so called political system, or of
present welfare state of solving all the problems. In theological terms, his
pessimistic view of humanity’s inherent imperfection is familiar as the fall
of man. The anthropological details of the tribal-seeming activities of the
small boys elicits grief at man's very nature powerfully; the pain and grief
that the boys, and we all are "suffering from the terrible disease of being
human" (Hot Gates: 87). Like Shakespeare’s tragedy Golding has laid bare
human nature, a stripping down of man to what he is. He has placed the
boys in an island letting them workout archetypal patterns of human society
in which the message of Christianity, the concept of original sin is enacted.
Golding is neither puritan nor transcendentalist, and his religious faith
is based upon his human experience as a man in search of knowledge, a
possible way out for humanity. In each novel a metaphorical structure is
constructed which can be read as traditional Christian statement about the
nature of man. Each metaphor underlines man’s depravity, pride and futility
of his reason. The Lord of the Flies is permeated with a sense of man's
innate depravity. Man is a fallen being and he is gripped by original sin. The
novel, by its very form, “insists on the recognition of the truth of the
orthodox Christian version of essential human depravity"(Dyson: 13).
Martian (PM) is a fallen man whose human consciousness is an
evolutionary specialization. Martin refuses the self-less act of dying. He
clings to the 'rocall' with his fierce, satanic will, refuses to acknowledge the
cosmic chaos of death till he is consumed by the black lightning of god.
Free Fall is basically on the Fall of Man, the expulsion from paradise. In the
title itself two overriding themes are made clear: Man is doomed by
Original Sin, and Fall is a reality. A similar metaphorical structure is built
around the erected wit and infected will of Sammy Mount joy while, with a
view to discovering a pattern, he journeys through free will in relation to the
68 scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of body under the force of
gravity. Sammy is a depraved as any other typical Golding hero as he falls
freely under his irresponsible and infected sexual lust.
An estimate of Golding's total accomplishment and his search for
ontology remain due as most of the critical judgments on his fiction have
sounded as clichés. Mostly one common theme that underlies all his work is
that man is always likely to revert back to primitive nature as naturally as
any other natural phenomena in the world. The cycle of man's rise to power
at one point and inevitable fall and regression at the other point recurs in his
fiction. Various symbols and metaphors have been used illuminate this
point.Penetrating questions for the Christian faith were asked on subjects
such as original sin, free will and the implication of mercy, to name just a
few.
Husserl’s concern regarding his ontology was: with what is known,
not how it is known. He considered, “the object of the phenomenological
method to be the immediate seizure, in an act of vision, of the ideal
intelligible content of the phenomenon” ( pheno, Encyclo).Golding’s
fictional characters exactly explore in the condition of their situatedness, an
act of vision. Arieka’s questioning self continues to haunt between the
binaries of whether she is a mundane or a spiritual person. Whether she has
felt the presence of god or still merged into the void what she often
witnessed and remained grief stricken: “At some point in my thought I
remembered how the gods had turned –but at that length of time,
remembering, things change. They had turned their backs on me-or had I
turned their backs for them” (DT125). Truth came out from her own mind
as she realized that she turned god facing away so that, “it can’t see what
you are doing” (DT125).
69 But could she escape God’s panoptic vision?-is a big question that
has pushed her from her birth in a state of ‘blazing light and warmth’ to her
looking back at life at ripe old age. Her realization and an answer to the
question is a simply statement, “...Void which I felt I had come across and
before which I lay in grief was –a kind of god? No. A void is a void, a
nothingness” (DT125).
Void is a symbol and it fluctuates through out unsettling the readers as to its
meaning .Golding characters endeavor to fill this void by their own power
of reasoning and action, but it ultimately resists any fixed symbolic
meaning. Psychological and philosophical implications run parallel to the
maturing of the characters and thus, the symbol turns into complicated
metaphor. Void, for her, is both nothingness and god and she can’t escape
its presence. By applying Arieka’s logic we all are being watched by one
god in a panoptic world.
The Vedanta philosophers hold that knowledge is not to be acquired
from without. It is the innate nature of the human soul and essential
brightness of everyman. All knowledge derives from our own thought
waves and it stimulates only striking against certain external stimuli and this
external stimuli is always present in some name or form. Nothing we can
think of without a name or form. Thus, the wave that passes across our mind
or thought takes different name at different time, space and causation. This
factor in the world is always present and exposure to different situations and
times enable human being to acquire knowledge which in turn keeps
changing and refining from grosser to fine forms. “Grosser knowledge may
be secular knowledge and its fine form must be spiritual as it itself speaks
for the differentiations of the body and mind, grosser and finer and the finer
one flashes upon us like the transcendent light.” (Vivekananda. 4:53).
70 The same happened with Simon in Lord of the Flies when his dead
body was laid in the ocean, the hallow that surrounded the clime was the
reflection of his finer knowledge. ; in Sammy’s case in Free Fall it was in
the prison cell and Golding’s craftsmanship is judged here in his character
creation that leads the character and the reader from ignorance to the light
of self-knowledge, from lower truth to higher truth. Truths have got many
faces. “The absolute truth is only one while relative truth s are necessarily
various” (4:53). Teaching of a great teacher does not appeal to everyone in
the same manner or same degree. What one appreciates, the other may fail
to grasp .The problem might not be suited to other person; everyone has
certain mental frame and experiences. Accordingly things are grasped and
assimilated. This universe is an absolute entity but the perception of it varies
to each and every one of us, for we grasp it from our own limit of idea and
thus form our own relative truth. According to Vivekananda, “These relative
truths, various though, are not wrong. They all reflect the one absolute
truth.”(4:53).Similarly Golding’s world speak of such relative truths behind
which lies the unified truth of unity of the universe, or monism.
All the literary theories and approaches are certain relative truth, and
contradict each other at a relative plane. Golding has confirmed:
It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I
saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin
and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing
bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their
deas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can
only escape by the most anarchic violence. These men were
reductionist, and I believe [...] I do indeed believe that at bottom the
violence of the last thirty years and it may be the hyper violence of
the century has been less a revolt against the exploitation of man by
71 man, less a sexual frustration, or an adventure in the footsteps of Oedipus,
certainly less a process of natural selection operating in human society, than
a revolt against reductionism, even when the revolutionary, or it may be the
terrorist, does not Know it(A Moving Target 5).
Ultimately, all reflect the one absolute truth in a variety of names and
forms. Unity is the centre which all of us struggling to reach and our
positions are at a varying distance from the absolute one. Contradictions are
a matter of distance but on reaching the centre all will fuse into one. This
Delphic oracle, Golding is speaking of again and again through the binary
demarcations of the world. Curiously the protagonists are getting the
glimpse of the truth, the centre, from which they speak.
A thorn in the body may be removed by another thorn and lastly both
are discarded. Evil must be countered by good until evil disappears. After
that the good also my turn into another evil and hence, it also need to be
discarded or conquered or else, it would keep following like a chain of
events in succession. This inspires our sense of non-attachment as it
happened with Sammy after he received heavy shocks of all the earthly
attachment. Jocelin turned out a mystic only after paying a price of his life
long suffering during the venture of his building the spire.
Golding came to this world to accept it knowing fully its play upon
human being. People may become famous by various means like power,
wealth etc., though fair or foul, but they never attain fullness until it is
accompanied by sympathy for the human kind. Golding’s was a
preoccupation to educate people through his artistic genius, not just to
supply stereotypical information, but to harmonize them with all existence.
Golding is criticized as having dealt with only the male characters
and avoided exploring any serious female character as his protagonist and
72 the Double Tongue is the answer to that which has explored Arieka’s
character from feminist point of view and the book is the sum total of what
Golding is all about combining all his fictional endeavor in the last
unpublished swan song. What people critiqued of his writings till the
Double Tongue underwent a little change toward a better polish on the
running theme after the posthumous publication of it and already
acknowledged noble laureate as a great artist is now explored as greater than
before.
Arieka avoided the touch of Ionides as whenever he touches her she
feels a shudder. The fear always haunts her, fear of being unworthy;
sometimes she laughs at her encounter of freeing her of him and sometimes
she broods as to being a woman, a weak species, “Together we walked
forward. The shuddering had gone. The fear was still there, but mixed, I do
no know how or why, with grief. It was grief about woman I think. Grief for
them as instruments to be played on by gods or men.”(68).When Arieka
feels the dread when her thought returns to her own affairs, the omniscient
voice reminds her, “Think of yourself as a soldier…Your dread is that of a
soldier who knows that one day he will have to face his fear-but not yet”
(70).All the Golding characters have faced life, its fears and learnt to
overcome it through constant endeavor.
Arieka could pronounce truth that she received from god out of her
visionary power. She received splendid accommodation, gifts and attendants
for supporting in all her needs, but she cared little for such worldly comforts
.On the other hand Ionides, her antithesis, was worldly person who was
content with riches, “People are investing not in you, but in the truth…You
will be rich woman in your right, my dear. The oracle benefits” (70).Arieka
had a clear vision of truth and communion with god what made her
pronounce the oracle; Ionides was just a coarse man with no power of
73 spirituality. He depended upon Arieka and always misguided her into telling
the lie to the people in maters of pronouncements what is made clear in his
statement, “You are the-or a-Pythia and I am the High Priest of Apollo. We
can say what we like and if anyone complains we can say we are inspired”
(72).
This world ever continues with the admixture of good and evil. It is
neither good nor evil. It is the state of mind that determines good or bad and
thus the actions follow. The state of mind only directed Roger or jack to be
villains, Sammy for his lust and finally, Matty or Simon turned to be saints.
Fire in itself is not good or evil. It is the use that produces the result of good
or bad. So also is it with the world. It is perfect to meet the ends. The way
we look at it, the same impression we form and accordingly we shape our
thought pattern.
Knowledge is always based upon experience. Golding made his
inference out of his own war- time experience and moved from partial to
most general experience of the world. The general experience of out the
mosaic of all fragments he could come to the particular experience that
relate to every human being. He is a scientist to put forward the concrete
result out of all the characters, their hamartia, interaction, and play upon
varied circumstances of this phenomenal world. Thus, comes the universal
experience of humanity. All the religious teachers preached what they
experienced and realized themselves. Similarly, great literary artist like
Browning, Tagore, Shakespeare or Golding and many such people have
experienced the truth differently and cloaked them from their own way to
teach humanity the universal experience s and truth.
His series of novels hinges upon one basic question and one single
answer as his thesis statement that all the differentiations are only on the
74 surface. All the things are necessary to smoothen our own knowledge and
experience. We must go through the process slowly yet certainly till we
come to realize the truth that there is a unity in every thing visible and non
visible. This, he called Delphic oracle or self- knowledge of one unifying
power at the back ground of all chaos and differentiation. The world, for
him, has been constant. The Inheritors does not speak of only of destruction
of innocence but it came in authors mind as the beacon of future condition
of global terrorism and bizarre incidents of neo colonial competitions
arising out of post modernist phenomena to which 21st century bears
testimony to.
The world still does not stop. There are people who feel the
responsibility and do their part to undo the evil. We keep inheriting both the
good and evil simultaneously till we perfect ourselves about the subtle truth
behind. Golding’s experience have been repeated for “The same truth was
found in all the religions- the Vedas, the bible etc, and if one experiences
the truth once that must have been experienced millions of times before and
will continue. Uniformity is the law of nature; what once happened can
happen always” (Vivekananda 1:127).
Lecture delivered by Vivekananda at Memphis, USA in 1894 on
destiny of man affirms that, “Be not deluded by your religion teaching
original sin, for the same religion teaches original purity. When Adam fell,
he fell from purity. Purity is our real nature and to regain that is the object of
all religion. All men are pure. That man you call brute is like the diamond in
the dirt and dust-brush the dirt off and it is a diamond (7:419).
Modern law of evolution explains that “the explanation of everything
comes from inside it” (1:372).The meaning of evolution is that the nature of
a thing is reproduced. The effect is nothing but the cause in another form
75 (1:372).The generalization principle along with the principle of evolution
brings an ultimate generalization, because the whole of universe is an ocean
thoughts in which each individual’s thought is a part of the whirlpools and
shades each other. Thus any theory put to highest generalization and
evolution proves the unity.
The New Testament also explains that God immanent in the universe,
very essence of things. We all are little expressions in the infinite oceans of
Existence, Knowledge, and Bliss. Martin’s ocean was symbolic of Infinite
Ocean but his ego shadowed him. He is the ignorance, Maya personified as
a generalization, not a particular one. Such ravenous ego separates us from
our true identity. The difference that exists in anything, be it ideology or any
material is a matter of degree, not kind. “The idea is that both good and evil
are different aspects or manifestation of the same thing. The idea that they
were two was a very wrong idea from the first, and it has been the cause of a
good deal of mystery in this world of ours” (Vivekananda 1:375). We all
seek liberty as it is our nature of being. Pythia desperately wanted to escape
her marriage and was “even willing to face death to escape this fate!” and
finally she decided “I will go as far as I can” (DT20).The author
deliberately uses italics to show that it is her quest of limitlessness.
Arieka looks back at her child hood- her days of shame and grief
when in the “artificial twilight she dropped down into grief, into sorrow;
beyond the shame…there was nothing but grief before the retreating backs
of the gods.” (DT 23) She was yet to overcome the maze of the binary
divisions of the world till she comes to self knowledge undergoing the
pangs of life.
Nothing has been good or bad throughout. There is no proof so far.
Both keep changing in application. There is an evolution in both the good
and evil. Both belong to the relative world. Two forces, since human
76 civilisation could grasp of it, are constantly working in multiple binary
forms, namely, differentiation /unifying, making /breaking, good/evil, recomposition/decomposition are constantly working in nature which
influences every minute object of nature including our thought and mind.
Differentiating is but to bring variations and new development, where as
integrating force attempts to bring sameness. Both the forces appear in
various names and forms what we find in the known history of ours like
crusade and harmony, war and peace etc. We shun away sameness in
normal case as homogeneity brings stagnation and growth stops completely.
For Vivekananda, “The idea of oneness has its advocates through out all
times” (1:430).From the inception of civilization down to the 21st century
people are clamoring for this ideal of unity. The epoch making French
Revolution in 1789 is a classic case. In modern times despite political
freedom, the nation states, particularly the third world, are constantly
fighting to bring parity with developed nations in all matters of concern. The
centre –periphery war is ever present in the nature with no bridge as
Golding aptly puts it:
But then, all day long action is weighed in the balance and found not
opportune nor fortunate nor ill-advised but good or evil. For this
mode which we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does
not touch it: touches only the dark things held prisoner,
incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Both
worlds are real. There is no bridge (FF 5).
If a bridge is made, it will bring stagnation .The Vedanta philosophy always
asserted for unity and knowledge of metaphysics reached it culmination
thousands of years before. “We are ruminating the same principle and
asserting the same in new language in the changed circumstances of the
world” (1:432).
77 But the variation, the conflict is must for the continuity of the world.
The world has to go on following nature, and life also has to move on.
That’s why there is no bridge and it does not mean that the movement stops
here as a matter of stagnation. “This is also a fact that in and through these
variations unity must be perceived” ( Vivekananda 1:433).
Pantheist like Wordsworth perceived the spiritual power in nature,
again nature is part of the spiritual power as we are the part of nature for,
“The whole universe is a play of unity in variety”(1:433).Further, variety
exists in unity. It is a play of differentiations and oneness, finite and infinite.
We must take both as the facts of the same perception. It is the way the
world ha been moving and will go on.
Here, for Golding, all variation is a part of our existence; the
dichotomy is a part of ours and a dead homogeneity is impossible in which
all variations would be lost and it is undesirable too. But the fact on the
other side remains that the unity already exists. not that the unity has to be
made or attempted; we are just to recognize it, perceive it the way Ralph
recognized the “end of innocence”.
What the author means that the differentiation and sameness exist
simultaneously to attain to this unity one requires certain preparation or
stages to cross. Sammy and Jocelin got it; Simon merged into infinity as a
Christ figure. Others lost in the maze of the world speaking in double
tongue. But in course of time all have to realize this oneness, this unity.
Golding displays deep influence of Vedanta philosophy and expressed it
with his extreme mastery of craftsmanship to show the reality through
indirection. The boys in the LF asserted ego upon one another but ultimately
they could not be rescued in the presence of the naval officer as innocence
was still a far cry in the world which is engrossed in violence and slaughter
during the World War II. But the positive point is that accepting,
78 understanding sameness leads one to a better understanding of the world
amid countless variations of this unique world.
Golding’s sheer motive is not the destruction of variations and the
establishment of sameness in the external world. It is impossible and would
lead to destruction of the civilisation. It is to recognize the unity in spite of
all these variations and to recognize that one ultimate power, supposing that
as god is within despite all the factors in daily life that troubles and upset us.
In his Nobel Lecture Golding said that:
Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal
pessimist but a cosmic optimist ... I meant, of course, that when I
consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules
which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical,
then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I
am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the
scientist's discipline forces him to ignore” “... Twenty years ago I
tried to put the difference between the two kinds of experience in the
mind of one of my characters, and made a mess of it. He was in
prison.
Sammy (FF) was caught between his two worlds of physical and
metaphysical worlds. Pincher Martin was put in a lone condition as it was
essential for self-realization and self-actualization. Boys’ world was
deserted on an island in a lone condition. It accounts for or helps one to
introspection toward a paradigmatic awareness of self consciousness.
Human being, from the
cradle to the grave seek intimacy, avoid
loneliness and it’s the primal struggle. It is the limit all human being
struggle to avoid as philosophical monism states that our being is infinite.
79 Hence, the protagonist through the ordeal of life arrives at ontological
deliberations.
Descartes holds that ‘cogito Argo sum’ (I think equals I am)
(Descartes).So,
self
consciousness
is
always
already
an
existing
phenomenon. He also asserts that, “The idea of God ontologically precedes
the idea of myself and thus there is reality beyond myself” (Descartes).PM’s
lone condition was his self conscious desire to remain reciprocally
connected to another thinking being. He was unable to make a communion
as ego devoured his light of consciousness. According to Descartes the mind
is better known in meditation. Vivekananda has already made it clear that
“concentrated mind is the lamp to show the soul” (4: 211).
Joseph Conrad in his Heart of Darkness obliterates the hope for any
optimism as his dominant theme says that we are strangers in this world. In
contrast to this PM is also a stranger and lonely in this world in as much as
it shows the disintegrating effect of such condition. Golding delved into the
buried self and martin discovers him in his self’s existential dilemma. Even,
Golding in depicting such condition seems to be ontologically insecure
person what he made clear through Pythia’s double tongue. Desert Island in
LF is also lone condition. One might not take the turning point in any novel
as something involved as intricate interpretation or ontological questions
involved. But, otherwise, each turning point is an explanation of moral and
psychological crisis in a protagonist leading to ontological deliberations.
Elliot, as quoted in Mundra, examined the metaphysical sensibility
that “elevates sense for a moment to regions ordinarily attainable to abstract
thought” (424).Golding in the same sense has touched upon metaphysical
heights of infinite light, the perception of which is beyond the physical
reality. Martin’s double death is a unique case in point.
80 Universalism in philosophy focuses on the unity of the universe and
the universality of mankind. The same term may be applied for religion or
politics meaning the commonality of religious faith, what our ancient sages
coined as “vasudhaiba kutumbakam” (every one in the world is my kith and
kin).So, beyond the binary, in the language of Coleridge, is “the
‘esemplastic’ power of the imagination” that combines the fragments into
one, renews the whole from part which also reminds Tagore’s words:
Where the world has not been broken
Up into fragments by narrow domestic walls…
Where the mind is led forward
By thee into ever widening
Thought and action… (Gitanjali 14).
Golding’s metaphysical vision is to restore the present civilisation
through his art while focusing on the order of the universe and the infinite.
In the Tempest, Prospero is deprived of his Dukedom by his brother and a
contrived storm is brought so that a group of people could be brought
together, only to be forgiven by Ariel. Golding, following Pope’s words,
“what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” attempted to bind that
sensibility through the actions of the characters and they are tailored only to
be suited by the fine garments of monism.
Sammy, an orphan, Marxist, POW, and an artist, questions himself,
“When did I lose my freedom? Once I was free. I had power to choose”
(FF81). The mechanics of cause and effect is statistical probability but more
often than not we operate below or beyond that threshold. Free-will can not
be debated but only experienced, like a colour or the taste of any food. The
81 novel offers every human being’s quest for the root cause of his/her fall
from grace:
How did I lose my freedom? I must go back and tell the story… in the
way it presents itself to me, the only teller. For time is to not to be
laid out endlessly like a row of bricks. That straight line from the first
hiccup to the last gasp is a dead thing. Time is two modes. The one is
an effortless perception native to us as water to the mackerel. The
other is a memory, a sense of shuffle fold and coil, of that day near
than that because more important , of that day mirroring this, or those
three set apart, exceptional and out of the straight line altogether (FF
32).
When Sammy shuffles back to his life, a complex and rich panorama of
characters he presents more complex than the boys’ world in the LF. He is
the controversial, central character among the characters, falling yet
attempting to rise. Sammy locates the moment of his fall which resembles as
universal:
All day long trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicilium
cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long, year in,
year out, the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals
a reality usable, understandable, and detached… All day long action
is weighed in balance and found not, opportune nor fortunate nor illadvised, but good and evil… both worlds are real. There is no bridge
(FF 7).
The realisation of Sammy after his life’s ordeal finds echo in Arieka’s entry
to this world, “A memory before memory? But there was no time, not even
implied. So how could it be before or after, seeing that it was unlike
anything else, separate, distinct, a one-off. No words, no time, not even I,
82 ego, since as I tried to say, the warmth and blazing light was experiencing
itself, if you see what I mean”(DT:3).
The search for ontology is a never ending process as the task of a
woman never ceases in any family across the world. Oa in The Inheritors is
the primal mother, Judy died of child birth (SP) and Arieka (DT) was an
iconic lady who left all the fragrance of absolute truth amid her life full of
action and suffering and it’s always satisfying as one has to fulfill his /her
duty in this world, else there is no escape. The Phoenician’s lady in the DT
murmured, “‘We women are never free’, it’s rather nice really” (DT107)
and one should go on till Gaia engulfs them who brought forth.
The black lightening engulfed Martin; he is dead, yet he held on to
survive in his ego only to obfuscate the ontological truth. He defied God
only to enjoy his capricious liberty. Against this backdrop, Sammy in the
cell surrendered to God in absolute dark and silence and had his vision of
resurrection. The condemned jack, (LF) always in killing spree in an
atavistic manner, is also only to liberate himself. The question of freedom
what every one struggles for knowingly or unknowingly is dealt through the
omniscient voice,
“Freedom isn’t a simple thing because people make theories about it.
The thing in itself, to coin a phrase, is not a matter of thought but a
matter of feeling. If you are as free as a man can be. But if your
feelings won’t stretch to a bigger entity, which makes the rules, then
you don’t feel free. As I see learning, I mean education, knowing
what’s what if you like, being street-wise –and for all your
philosophers, that’s what it comes to –is the ability to feel larger
entity…that you aught to feel
Panhellinia!”(DT108).
for a larger area, I’ll call it
83 The term Panhellinia is used in the sense of a vision that accommodates
every human being as the author felt genuinely all human being is his kith
and kin; all have a common origin from the mother goddess, Gaia. Hence, it
is more of a person’s ability to feel rather than just speaking in all lifeless
lofty terms.
Golding has made inquiry into post colonial culture studies from his
understanding of humanity at large. When he speaks of universal
brotherhood, Gaia, and philosophical monism, certainly his view would
reflect those. Through the words of Phoenician he expresses his
understanding of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled:
Going round the world one comes across people who feel as we are
saying, feel for the oddest groupings. But I have come to the
conclusion that people would rather be ruled by a gangster of their
own, however harsh his rule, than by a good and just ruler who is a
foreigner. Don’t ask me why. It’s the nature of the beast (DT109).
In chapter VI of the Double Tongue, Arieka confesses regarding the
power and purity one needs to attain the height whence one can speak in
elevated terms. Golding deliberately used such elevated terms and left his
lofty treatise as he knew certain that in 20th century the world is plunged
into the myth of progress and in mad pursuit of every thing mundane
oblivious of the true essence of the world and if the world is too late to
realize then damage could be enormous. Hence, Golding took the task upon
himself of waking and answering people into elevation, “I did sometimes
give and answer in hexameters though that answer was never easy. It
required a certain elevation of the spirit though it caused a greater stir than I
was aware of at the time” (DT115).
84 The Corinthian has given his opinion on freedom what he learnt out
of his life, “The conclusion I’ve come to this matter of freedom is this. It’s a
question of size. What size group of people are we going to belong to? I
don’t think the gods have made us capable of rational judgment, which is
where your philosophers go wrong. It’s a man’s instinct to belong to a
group” (DT107).
All mortal souls are bound by the world of differentiations and
deficiency. So our vision and judgment have necessarily to be corrupted by
de facto human being. Human condition itself is responsible and we are
bound to accept it. Golding had no existential dilemma or any absurdity
there of for humankind. His vision is straight and simple as he could speak
through the hexameter. It is more important that we need to create a
measure for ourselves what justifies our lot. Pythia had her measure that she
could pronounce the truth of god and immensely revered. Hence, in the
world of binary, we are to make us perfect flutes the compass of which
would be used by God to play upon and the finer the compass, sweeter
would be its music. Perhaps, Golding made him a perfect flute of whose
music charmed the world with a magic to dispel all darkness, though not
without any flaws as he was a human being of flesh and blood.
Plato’s idea on art and ontology is worth mentioning here as Golding
held him in highest respect. For him, art must play a limited and very strict
role in the perfect Greek Republic. Richter states that, “...poets may stay as
servants of the state if they teach piety and virtue, but the pleasures of art
are condemned as inherently corrupting to citizens..." (Richter 19). what
prompted Plato to include the Socratic dialog is his belief that art was a
mediocre reproduction of nature...what artists do...is hold the mirror up to
nature: They copy the appearances of men, animals, and objects in the
physical world...and the intelligence that went into its creation need involve
85 nothing more than conjecture" (Richter 19). The role of art, for him, is to
teach morality and ethics, else it is damaging to its audience and his
Republic.
On the other hand, Aristotle viewed poetry (and rhetoric), a
productive science, whereas he thought logic and physics to be theoretical
sciences and ethics and politics practical sciences (Richter 38). He viewed
poetry and drama as means to an end as the elements like language, rhythm,
and harmony as well as plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle
influence the audience's catharsis (pity and fear). Golding well understood
the heart of the controversial approach and justified Plato in as much as
Plato’s argument was correct what says that (mimetic) art is institutionally
divorced from truth, goodness or any concern with 'real' beauty. It creates an
environment of superficial ‘flavors’ where all sorts of atrocities can be made
to seem a tempting confection. Hence, Golding is a bridge between the two
as his art addresses the issues of absolute truth, defects of human being and
the way of redemption while following Aristotelian concept of "Organic
Unity", the idea that in any good work of art each of the parts must
contribute to the overall success of the whole. Good work explores
psychological forces and the unseen "inner life" of people in general. Here,
lies his special position among the post war writers.
In western philosophy, Plato first declared that the world is unreal,
god is the real and the entire phenomenal world is His reflection what
Vedanta philosophy already declared the same truth much before him.
Golding has echoed the same realization in modern times having gone
through the vicissitudes of life that we are strangers in this world what he
declares through the words of Arieka, “I detected…that all religions were
not foolish nor their customs , and that the cosmos which we inhabited was
86 a stranger place than people sometimes thought. We must not take our
modern wisdom for granted as a final thing” (DT 116).
Decomposed Pincher Martin’s survival can best be substantiated by
the fact that: “What is mind but that ceaseless inquiry into the meaning and
mystery of life?” (Vivekananda 1:334).Pincher is a thorough rake and
detestful character whose struggle can best be contrasted in the words of
St.Paul as quoted by Vivekananda: “The God that ye ignorantly worship,
Him declare I unto you” (1:340) which, again in the words of Vivekananda,
means:
“Consciously
or
unconsciously
we
are
all
striving
for
perfection…The man who is groping through sin, through misery, will reach
it, but it will take time. Some hard knock on his head will help him to turn to
the lord. The path of virtue, purity, unselfishness, spirituality, becomes
known at last. (1:340).Pythia echoes the same word, “We are wrapped in
mysteries. I know that. I have come to know that. Until I had my courses
time did really stand still for me.” (DT14).
“O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of
infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, (1968) 263
87 Work Cited
Abhedananda , Swami .Good and Evil. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta
Math Pub. Print.
Baker, James R. "Golding's Progress in Novel”, Contemporary Literary
Criticism, Fall, 1973. Gale Cengage, 1975. 62-70. Print.
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory, An Introduction of Literary and Cultural
Theory.2 nd ed.rep.Chennai 2004. Manchester &New York:
ManchesterUP, 1995. Print.
Dejnozka, Jan.
The Ontology of the Analytic Tradition and its
Origins:Realismand Identity in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and
Quine. New York: Rowman & Littlefield P, 1996. 6- 7.Print.
Fleck, A.D. “The Golding Bough: Aspects of Myth and Ritual in The Lord
of theFlies”, On The Novel. ed. B.S. Benedikz. London, J.M. Dent
P.1971.51-53.print.
Flood ,Alison . “Golding’s Crisis”. 10 Apr’12”.n.pag.Web. 18 June’12.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/11/william- goldingcrisis>
Golding ,William, ‘Belief and Creativity’, A Moving Target.London:Faber
& Faber, 1982. 185–202. Print.
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Lord of the Flies. 10th ed. Rep. 1986. Madras: Madras Oxford
University Press, 1955.Print.
---.
The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber, 1955.Print.
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Pincher Martin. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. Print.
---..
Free Fall. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. Print.
---.
The Spire. London: Faber and Faber, 1964. Print.
---.
The Hot Gates and Other Occasional Pieces. rep. 1984 .London:
Faber and Faber,1965. Print.
---.
Rites of Passage. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. Print.
---.
A Moving Target. London: Faber and Faber, 1982. Print.
---
The Double Tongue. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Print.
88 Green ,Peter. “The World of William Golding”, William Golding: Novels,
1954 –67 case Book Series, ed. A. E Dyson. London: Macmilan,
1985.72- 78.print.
Hynes, Samuel. William Golding. 2nd ed.Columbia:Columbia UniversityP,
1968.Print.
Jacquette ,Dale. Ontology. Montreal, Mc-Gill-Queens's University Press,
2002.2-3.print.
Karl, Frederick R. "The Metaphysical Novels of William Golding." A
Reader'sGuide to the Contemporary English Novel. rep. 1962.New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc, 1962. 254-60. Print.
Kermode, Frank. Theophany.Library.com .n.pag.Web.13Mar.2012.
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/frank-kermode/theophany>
Mundra,S.C.Principles and History of Literary criticism.Meerut:Prakash
book depot,2995.Print.
“phenomenology”.
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Columbia
Electronic
Encyclopedia.
Columbia.n.pag.Web.11Mar2012. <www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/>
“phenomenology.”
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freedictionary.com.n.pag.
web.11Feb.2012
<http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/phenomenology>
Richter. The Critical Tradition.ed. David H. Classical Texts and
ContemporaryTrends.1998.Print.
Scott, MaryLynn. “Universal Pessimist, Cosmic Optimist: William
Golding”. Aurora Online .n.pag. 1990. 23 may’12.Web.
<http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/50/63>
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Madras: McMillan P, 1968. Print.
"The Nobel Prize in Literature 1983". Nobelprize.org. 9 Apr 2012 n.p.18
May’12.web.<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laur
eates/1983/ >
Tagore, Rabindranath. Gitanjali.Shantiniketan: Vishwabharati P. 1978.Print.
Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. I, 2
THEURIGISM IN
GOLDING’S FICTION
89 Theurgy, derived from Greek terms, was used in ancient times as a
traditional religious purification ritual. It is formed by combining two terms
namely, ‘theos’, meaning gods and ‘ergeia’, meaning work and together
they express divine working or functioning of god (Bowker). Theurgy as a
first recorded use of the term was found in the mid-second century neoPlatonist work, the Chaldean Oracles and the source of Western theurgy
can be found in the philosophy of late Neo-Platonist, especially Iamblichus.
It holds that, “The spiritual Universe is a series of emanations from the One.
From the One emanated the Divine Mind (Nous) and in turn from the
Divine Mind emanated the World-Soul (Psyche)” (wiki). Neo-Platonist
insisted that the One is absolutely transcendent and in the emanations
nothing of the higher was lost or transmitted to the lower, which remained
unchanged by the lower emanations. Although the Neo-Platonists are
considered polytheists, they embraced a form of monism.
Later on, it was adopted by the magical wing of Platonism as a
process of cleansing the lower aspects of the self to establish a foundation
for higher philosophical contemplation. During the first centuries of the
Common Era it developed into a distinct school and served as part of the
same fusion of Platonic philosophy and popular occultism which gave birth
to ‘Hermeticism’ and many ‘Gnostic’ traditions. The chief contributor to its
formulation was Iamblichus of Chalcis (Bowker: 330).
Iamblichus of Calcis (Syria), a student of Porphyry, was a line of
disciple of Plotinus. He taught a more ritualized method of theurgy
involving invocation and religious, as well as magical, ritual. Iamblichus
believed theurgy was an imitation of the gods, and he described theurgic
observance as ‘ritualized cosmogony’ (wiki) that endowed embodied souls
with the divine responsibility of creating and preserving the cosmos. Where
as, Plotinus urged contemplations for those, who wished to perform theurgy,
90 the goal of which was to reunite with the Divine, called henosis. Therefore,
his school resembles a school of meditation or contemplation.
The practice of theurgy has its own variety and affiliations, one of
them being pagan theurgy. Julian, the last pagan Roman Emperor, was a
staunch theurgist and a reverent student of Iamblichus' writings, promoted a
resurgence of paganism in the fourth century based heavily on theurgy for a
philosophical stance, and he advocated for, “A basis for mutual tolerance
and support. Even after the political defeat of paganism, theurgists such as
Proclus and Sosipatra continued its teaching and practice” (Bowker: 971).
However it dwindled out slowly on the edges of the Byzantine Empire but
seemed to survive in outposts such as Harran until the Middle Ages.
A Christian interpretation of it is ‘divine action’ and further
interpreted it to be “the inducement of a direct action of God through a
human agent” (Greer: 483-484). Theurgy calls on help from divinely
powerful saints and angels who are intermediaries between God's power and
common human being. It invokes the powers opposed to demonic forces
and hence, in sharp contrast with black magic. Neo-Platonism has taught
that the theurgy as a divine power transforms the soul into a mystic and one
attains superhuman qualities. The language and various practices of theurgy
were revived during the Renaissance. This revival was assisted by the
spread of classical Platonism and Hermenuiticism.
According to Esoteric Christian theurgy, it is a traditional wisdom
and practice which can benefit human being immensely in spiritual quest. It
is a tradition that if an Esoteric Christian, Rosicrucian, or Theosophist
practices it, s/he is considered a Magus, or Adept. It also focuses on
understanding the mysteries of God, and learning to attain higher
consciousness and it can heighten one's own spiritual nature. In Esoteric
91 Christianity, “Theurgy usually is the practice of trying to gain the
knowledge and conversation of one's Higher Self, or Inner God, to teach one
spiritual truths and wisdom from God that one couldn't learn from man”(
Nelstrop:109-110).
There are two slightly different argument regarding Theurgy. Proclus
holds that Theurgy is "a power higher than all human wisdom embracing the
blessings of divination, the purifying powers of initiation and in a word all
the operations of divine possession” (wiki). Anne Sheppard on the other
hand argues that theurgy, the religious magic practised by the later NeoPlatonists, degenerated into magic, superstition and irrationalism(212214).Unlike not so educated people who romanticize Theurgy fraudulently
assigning to it their own systems and whimsical ideologies, the educated
people view it as the Science of Divinity.
A recent view holds that the Theurgy is, “Always beneficent in
nature. Be it the spiritual evolution of the individual, the exaltation of the
soul or Godhead, the transmutation of the gross into the fine, or the
protection of the quality of life throughout the human race, the work and
aim of Theurgy is firstly beneficial to the magician, through whom others
may come to be benefited”(Divine science).
The Egyptian theological sciences and practices of Theurgy accept
the need of priesthood and layers of people under him which sounds the
system of ‘Gurukula’ in Indian system of practice.
Ideologically this
includes the belief in multiple layers of existence and therein several bodies
composing the human persona, faith in an afterlife, and a devout study of
how the natural world and the actions of the supposed gods interact.
Theurgy also contains components of the ancient teachings of the
Pythagorean, Eleusinian, Orphic, and Platonic Mystery Schools, particularly
92 the evolution of the universe and all components therein. Theurgy is at once
a polytheism and monotheism, believing in the existence of both the world
of reality and reflection giving each its due respect and reverence, and yet
believing also in a absolute oneness or monism.
The Chaldean Oracles also offer an attainment which is called “That
which is the end of understanding” (Divine Science). It is the highest point
of attainment within Theurgy; a state of mind similar to the Samadhi of
yogis. Here, the Theurgist becomes illuminated inwardly in the maximum
state of understanding, total Gnosis wherein the consciousness of the
Theurgist becomes identified with the consciousness of the Universe itself.
Theurgy develops in two stages: Progression of the Self and
Progression of the World, successively. Both are inter related, one helping
the other, but until self is not purified one can not do any good to the society
as the individual is the unit of any given society and Golding while showing
the regression in the present day Godless world, ushers in the way to the
transformation of the world via the individual souls to God’s timeless
presence. ‘Universal pessimist’ what he was thought of initially was his
power of Theurgy to help every soul, who is otherwise the purest being,
diagnose the root of the disease of human predicament, the only way to lead
to the original purity and realization of the non-duality of existence. In the
present chapter all his major works would be analyzed as to show how
different characters face extreme situation, even magical and their encounter
and learning help the readers to unlearn their modern cramped values and in
the process Golding plays his role as a theurgist.
The structure of Golding novel plays through binary opposition and
identifiably it moves from the loss of culture to corruption, innocence to
experience, ignorance to knowledge, and rational knowledge to spiritual
93 knowledge and the texture is superbly woven through the artifact of fictional
characters to force the readers into forming the conjectures of either of the
two. The magic spells that go between the two are his symbols and
metaphors and an omniscient third person narrator who consolidates the
reader’s judgment, for example, “Ralph weeps for the end of innocence, the
darkness of man’s heart” (LF: 116).The symbols are darkness, conch shell,
fire, the people, the head on a stick, face paint, double tongue, incoherent
babble, fall etc. which pulsates in the reader’s mind as a magical spell to
remind them of their true self of oneness, which is apparently darkened by
the heat and dust of the phenomenal world .
The Industrial Revolution of ‘getting and spending’ in Victorian
period soon witnessed the moral vacuum and the death of God. For
Nietzsche, “The death of God meant that traditional ‘soft’ Christian values
would be lost over time” (Moral relativism: 3). He felt that these morals,
which limited the individual’s creativity and potential, would be replaced
with man-made values over time. Man’s next task, For Nietzsche, would be
to create a new grounding for morals in the absence of a divine order which
he felt was a tremendous opportunity and chance for human beings. But
ironically, political parties such as the Nazi party have referred to
Nietzsche’s
work
to
support
their
anti-Semitic
ideologies.
Most
philosophers argue that this was a misinterpretation of the author’s ideas,
and that Nietzsche was not a libertine who denied humanity should not have
morals. Rather, he urged the re-evaluation of morals often taken for granted
in society.
There are several criticisms aimed at moral relativism. In stark
contrast to this position is moral universalism, which sustains that there is a
system of morals that can be applied universally regardless of the
distinguishing features between individuals. Noam Chomsky argues that,
94 “Any code of morals worth paying attention to must have moral
universalism at its core, and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights is an attempt to create a universal system of ethics” (Moral
relativism: 3). Others, when considering human slavery, the Holocaust, the
Apartheid, and other events that caused mass human suffering and death,
cannot imagine that a reasonable individual would consider these atrocities
anything other than evil. They do not see that there could be room to debate
whether these events were good or evil. Here, comes William Golding with
his magic spell of his series of fiction each one showing how the so called
civilized society as in the LF or any human being could be depraved and the
possible way out from this dark world.
RM Ballantyne's naively imperialist story The Coral Island was
overturned with the Lord of the Flies, which warps Ballantyne's tale into an
allegory about the wickedness of human species and its rightful rejection
from the Eden garden. The novel, as remarked by the critic Lionel Trilling,
“Marked a mutation in culture: God may have died, but the Devil was
flourishing, especially, in English public schools” (Guardian).
Susan Robinson in his blog has mentioned about John Carry, who is noted
for the biography of Golding, as having written about Golding’s art on
cultural and aesthetic revision leading to a perfect role of a theurgist. His
novel continues to be a source of therapeutic use in 21st century as Carry
recounts:
How a group of book-shunning young offenders responded to the
themes of exclusion and isolation in The Lord of the Flies and
advocates reading as a remedy for boredom and apathy; People are
starting to realize more and more that reading has therapeutic
potential. It’s not only for young offenders, people in prison, but also
people in hospitals, people recovering from breakdowns particularly
95 and that idea that you get out of yourself into some other kind of
world… literature gives you ideas in the way that other arts cannot
always do. I find that with books they change because you change, as
you get older, as you develop new parts of yourself you find
something different (Robinson).
His daughter Judy, in an interview says that “He was one of the
funniest men I knew. And he would laugh at himself… one of the roles he
felt he fulfilled was that of a clown. In life, he felt he was clownish, in the
good and the bad sense." She says that the character of Lok in The
Inheritors… is an accurate self-portrait of the artist as a simpleton. This
imaginative reconstruction of the life of a band of Neanderthals speaks to
the side of Golding that always reveled in the primal and the potentially
savage (William Golding crisis).
As a theurgist, Golding shows in the Lord of the Flies how different
people feel the influences of the instincts of civilization and savagery to
different degrees. Piggy, for instance, has no savage feelings, while Roger
seems barely capable of comprehending the rules of civilization. Generally,
however, Golding implies that the instinct of savagery is far more primal
and fundamental to the human psyche than the instinct of civilization.
Golding sees moral behavior, in many cases, as something that civilization
forces upon the individual rather than a natural expression of human
individuality. When left to their own devices, Golding implies, people
naturally revert to cruelty, savagery, and barbarism. This idea of innate
human evil is central to Lord of the Flies, and finds expression in several
important symbols, most notably the beast and the sow’s head on the stake.
Among all the characters, only Simon seems to possess anything like a
natural, innate goodness. As the boys on the island progress from wellbehaved, orderly children longing for rescue to cruel, bloodthirsty hunters
96 who have no desire to return to civilization. They lost their sense of
innocence what they possessed before landing to the island.
But Golding does not portray this loss of innocence as something that
is done to the children; rather, it results naturally from their increasing
openness to the innate evil and savagery that has always existed within
them. Golding implies that civilization can mitigate but never wipe out the
innate evil that exists within all human beings. The forest glade in which
Simon sits symbolizes this loss of innocence. At first, it is a place of natural
beauty and peace, but when Simon returns later in the novel, he discovers
the bloody sow’s head impaled upon a stake in the middle of the clearing.
The bloody offering to the beast has disrupted the paradise that existed
before. It’s a powerful symbol of innate human evil disrupting childhood
innocence.
Boden has observed that, “William Golding’s prose styles engendered
an appreciation of not only his content but also the unique creative
techniques, showing the narratorial alternatives” (76). The Lord of the Flies
falls into the category of island literature like that of the Tempest in which
Prospero using his rough magic transforms the island into an allegorical
space. A comparative study would make it clear as to how why this instinct
varies. The black magic in that island is repressive against Caliban and other
spirits, even Miranda suffers her chastity. Devices like magic, spiritual
element and monstrosity fill the allegorical space. The drama is close to the
Lord of the Flies as at the initial stage both island were full of charm and
natures bounty. Slowly both degenerate into a place of repression and
torture under the superior masters because, “in general terms ‘island
literature’ deals with otherness; in keeping with our referential framework ,
the unknown island is conceived of as a self- contained possible world for
97 the
colonial
imagination,
a
place
anything
unexpected
can
happen”(Gonzalez).
When Prospero lands on the island he uproots Sycorax’s black magic
and replaces his own. The play begins and ends with magic to remind the
readers the instability of our lives. His verbal power was derived from books
and creates beautiful pageants, sweet music, apes and a power to subdue
even the nature. Magic delights the senses throughout the play as it tames
the fairies, enjoys negative pleasure of torturing Caliban deploying the apes,
and raises storms both at the beginning and at the end. Prospero’s magic
represents the colonial repressive power.
Reason creates a motive force for any action and the characters are
played upon with the hold of their reason. “Reason is also understood as an
imperial value from an ironical position in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Fear
of the supernatural and ideological manipulation lead a group of children to
show that the seeds of colonial and imperial behavior are, in a certain way
genetically transmitted” (Gonzalez).Jack’s band of the boys create a
paroxysm of horror produced by the initiation of adult strategies of control
and order which in turn regress them into savagery and the island a world of
chaos.
The magic of the adult world is imitated by the small boys and keeps
floundering in searching for evils outside and in the supernatural. The
natural man, Caliban suffered in the hand of Prospero by his wrong use of
language and cultural power. Piggy, the archetype of intellectual ‘other’
sacrifices his life but very curiously he leaves his glass which is the magic
telescope for Golding to show the somber magic the world is has pushed in
for. Society manipulates people what Golding wants to put forward. Each
character in the Lord of the Flies represents a different part of man as he has
evolved in the course of the progress of the story.
98 Throughout the story, Golding uses symbolism to show how people
are manipulated by society. This idea can not only be seen in the story, but
also throughout the course of mankind. Events such as the murder of the
Jews by Hitler, the extermination of millions of American Indians by the
U.S. government, and the murder of millions of unborn babies by people
who claim to be ‘pro choice’ and the continuous mass exodus occurring in
the present world due to continuous war and sectarian violence prove faulty
educational and civilized values.
The cover design of the Lord of the Flies by Neil Gower
commemorating Golding’s centenary is in itself a magical feat that can
unsettle any naïve reader into deep pondering and thus leading one from
innocence to experience of rude, harsh real world of ours. Peter Conrad
comments about the cover design that is:
Stark, grim, and as primitive as the African masks – emblems of
witchcraft and malevolent voodoo – that Picasso used to collect. It
focuses on the conch, Golding's symbol of governance; but the
beautiful shell has been fitted with two rows of fangs, which turns its
trumpet-shaped aperture into the luring mouth of a shark. Inside the
orifice, looking out from the belly of the beast is a human face, with
tribal scarifications that widen its eyes in terror and leave its mouth
gaping open in dismay. It could be the portrait of a reader, swallowed
whole by the book and aghast at the corrosive knowledge it brings
with it (peter Conrad).
Golding’s theurgist power is understood and explained by critics who
happened to talk to him and shared views on numerous occasions despite
reading and writing about him in depth. Once Golding opined to some
dinner companions that saints were the most interesting things it was
99 possible to talk about – especially ‘miraculous, levitating saints’. Frank
Kermode notes:
“He admired man’s long and successful struggle against the opposing
forces of evil. He explained to his editor, Charles Monteith that Matty
in Darkness Visible was meant to be a saint, like Simon …‘It’s a
figure I’ve tried for again and again and I suppose Matty in Darkness
Visible is as near as I shall ever get.’ He wanted to assert an affinity
between the saint and the creative artist. The priest’s inexplicable but
incontrovertible power was to know people, ‘to see clean through’ his
penitents. It could be said that Flaubert, George Eliot and Dostoevsky
shared that power; and it might also be said that Golding himself
aspired to it” (Theophany).
Frank Kermode also mentions that Golding once remarked that had he been
born in Germany he would have been a Nazi which means exposure has its
effect on character building. His confession should be considered along with
evidence that shows him to have been a generous and accessible man, with a
deep, almost superstitious respect for goodness in others. He honoured that
sanctity, which he first sought to express in the character of Simon in Lord
of the Flies (Theophany).
When Golding utters through the omniscient voice, “You know there
are oracles everywhere” (78), he accepts that the goodness, the truth is every
where present in this world and we need to live up to that leaving behind all
narrow judgments. Spiritualist Golding has understood well the value of
purity, patience and perseverance in life. If one does not have it, one must
try patiently. Arieka began to loathe the lies of Ionides in matters of
pronouncing oracles as when Ionides used to prepare the place of oracle and
he would sit near the sacred tripod keeping a place for her to sit, she would
avoid as she says, “I turned away” (81). But the omniscient voice reminds
100 the readers that, “The day would come soon enough. Why run to meet it”
(81)? Here, the day is the time of purification through our karma.
Ionides is a Victorian skeptic who always doubted the presence of
god or of any spiritual power. He does not mind committing blasphemy of
lying or stealing the words of Arieka in the name of god, but Arieka
condemned blasphemy as it is made clear through Ionides, “That is exactly
as it should be…I wish devoutly that when you go down there god will
really speak through you-I wish it but I don’t believe it” (83).Further he
confesses, “Look. I speak in all seriousness. I am a flimsy creature, not solid
like you. But when you go down those steps and climb on to the sacred
tripod, you are free. You are the freest woman in the Hellas-in the world!
You will say what you will say” (83-84).A skeptic now is a transformed
person having understood the power of Arieka’s theurgy and the darkness
begins to evanesce. In the Tempest, we find that Prospero is willing to return
to Milan abjuring his ‘rough magic’ and forgiving his enemies. He, no
longer, is now interested in his dukedom, hence, no magic. The entire
tempest that began during the course of his worldly duties has calmed down
now. Time for rough magic for Ionides, in all probability, is over.
The title Double Tongue is justified in terms of Ionides’ approach to
the world. He knew that Arieka would not concoct any truth, where as he is
apt in it. He wants Arieka to speak out in his agreement and if not, he is
ready to pass them as his own even though people say, “Ionides is a false
priest and should be destroyed here and now” (84).He clarifies his position,
“I speak with the tongues of men. You should speak with the tongues of
Holy Messengers” (84).Immediately the omniscient narrator makes the
double standard of Ionides clear:’ If we can not have the one let us at least
have the other’ (84).
101 The author is quite aware of the still sad music of humanity, its
limitations and the style of functioning of people whose words do not come
out from the depth of their being. This sad smile is the darkness of human
heart what is made amply clear in the first novel and what annihilated the
innocent people in the second novel.
The constant seeking after saintliness is contrasted with his oft’ used
symbol of darkness. Darkness presents a situation how to live in life or
chose a living. Simon in the Lord of the Flies had a unique understanding of
darkness. Nathaniel in the Pincher Martin says that “god has bleak
lightening that reduces man to nothingness” (67).He accepts nature in its
full potential to hold sway on us and hence, he voices his concern on the
technique of dying into heaven and he wishes to resign to “an
overwhelmingly greater power” (Weeks 155).Martin is too obstinate to
submit to fate. He refuses the pity of the cruel God. He struggles a
Promethean struggle and stands tall as Satan,
What though the heaven is lost
All is not lost… (Paradise Lost).
Thus, Nathaniel is a saint and Martin his antithesis- a Christ bearer
relinquishes Christian values. In fact, Nathaniel and Mary’s treatment to
Martin left a gap. He felt a gap of separation with Mary, the mother figure.
He has had hallucination and deliriums to fill this gap. The metaphor of
circle what Martin sees is this gap, the void. It’s absence of any absolute
point. The same circle, finally, engulfs him like a black hole.
Sammy suffered the conflict between science and religion. Two times
he faces such conflicts, one is homogeneous, another, a succession of
immeasurable moments. That each one of us is a morally flawed creature is
put forward as a perfect Theurgy in all the fiction. In an age when many
102 writers have found it difficult to codify man's experience or they are lost in
the maze of existential dilemma; Golding has come out with his well
constructed fables with allegorical metaphors suggesting the reality, the
performance of man's nature that almost rest on the validity of their
Christian parallels. As a Spiritual cosmologist he has shown this reality of
man's nature, and the knowledge of good and evil without forcing any
artificial pattern on them. He has himself proclaimed that names or labels do
not matter; it is the ultimate reality that counts. He is sometimes charged as
being trite, but he contends that: “what is trite is true, and a truism can
become more than a truism when it is a belief passionately held"
(Handerson: 374). Man grows up in an illusory world built through his
senses and rational intellect.
He has assumed the role of a pattern maker ever since he acquired
rational consciousness. Martin is an extreme case of forcing a pattern of his
consciousness even at the cost of his life. He forces an artificial pattern “to
fit everywhere over the rock and the sea and the sky"(PM: 162). But a
cosmic pattern of death annihilates his self imposed pattern of separate
identity. Both the Lord of the Flies and Darkness Visible depict that evil
reside in humanity's innermost nature and civilization suffers dissolution by
such sinister force.
A civilization can not perpetuate longer if it is divorced from right
morality and ends. In the process of seeking pattern man imposes his own
evil motives, ill will on others and brings misery to all. Martin's Promethean
struggle, Jocelin's big dare or Sammy's Dantesque quest are all conceived in
a rational mind divorced from right moral purpose. They act to their
voracious ego and suffer hubris.
The web of memory shuttle to and fro: where is the wrong turning
point? This probing begins only after his ordeal in Nazi concentration camp
103 as a POW. The POW officer, a coldly clever academic psychologist, applies
various pressures in order to make him betray his comrades’ escapes–plans.
What we hear is Sammy’s frantic auto-biographical search for the incidents
which, in the past, made him take one moral decision rather than another,
his spiritual fear. He attempts to hold out his inner resources against his
tormentor. The particular spiritual fear that haunts him is the sordid love
tragedy with Beatrice in which the girl suffers ignominy of betrayal and
finds her home in an asylum. Johnston observes that here Sammy begins his
search: “His goal is to isolate at which he made the step from freedom of
innocence to the captivity of guilt to recognize ‘the Decision made freely
that cost me my freedom’”(Johnston:56).Referring to his story, Sammy says
that “the external events… are common enough …” (FF: 6). He is a bastard
and lives in a rural slum of Rotten Row under the dominant influence of his
Ma, ‘as near a whore as makes no matter’, and Evie, ‘a congenital liar’. He
considers his mother, a charwoman, amoral. She is a massive, sagging
creature, mottled and dirty. Evie’s flair for fantasy brightens Sammy’s
childish world. The small boy’s world is lit with romance, beauty, drama,
mystery, that is as real as or more real than the ‘realities’ they illuminate.
Sammy finds Rotten Row “roaring and worm, simple and complex,
individual and strangely happy and a world into itself” (FF: 33). Here only
Sammy nurtures his passion for art. He is also quite happy and feels “his life
is free from sin… like the other children is exalted’ with a sense of his own
humanity, fore shadowing a later episode that brings him to a state far
removed from exaltation” (Johnston: 57).
At last Sammy focuses on the crucial moment of his fall making the
gap between his being and the action of his becoming more explicit. He
repeatedly asks himself: when did he lose or alienate his freedom, when did
he fall from his childhood state or grace? The loss of freedom and the fall of
man are one and the same event which Sammy Mount joy is predestined by
104 his ironical name. As he goes to bid farewell to school, Nick suggests him to
pursue his free will. His headmaster gives him the parting advice: “If you
want something enough, you can always get it provided you are willing to
make the appropriate sacrifice. Something, anything. But what you get is
never quite what you thought; and sooner or later the sacrifice is always
regretted (FF: 235).
Sammy walks out into the hot summer day and discovers the answer
to the headmaster’s question: ‘what is important to you?’ in ‘the white,
unseen, body of Beatrice Ifor.’ He decides that Beatrice is important to him;
he will sacrifice everything to achieve his goal. He crosses the bridge
ignoring the red light and moves towards the consummation of his wish. In
the wood, he loses his final chance of purification. In the formal catechism
of self–damnation, he deliberately chooses the part for the whole.
Subba Rao comments here, “like Adam he acts freely and loses his
freedom” (60). Now, the titles mythic and scientific connotations become
clear. From his ironical name he now descends into sorrow rather that
mount in joy. Having lost the power of choice, he finds himself hovering in
a state of free fall between the spirit and flesh, between the world of Simon
and Piggy. As the loss of freedom and the fall result from a man’s use of his
free will, the whole problem is one of guilt and responsibility.
The spire is termed as a comedy as well as a tragedy. The spire with
all its imperfections stands as an object of glory and Jocelin, the central
character, ultimately comes out victorious thus, rendering the novel as a
comedy. It is also tragic in so far as it describes the lowly fall and
destruction of Jocelin and his four human pillars, a chronicle of the down
fall of great men. The novel is more akin to Greek tragedy in its theme and
structure. The ritual murder of Pangal provides the structure of the novel
105 quite as much as the construction of the spire does. The action of the book is
Joceline’s progress from ignorance to self–knowledge.
The works of Aeschylus is very much evident in the tragedy of
Jocelin: man’s fall as a result of the violation of the limits set by the order.
“Jocelin commits hubris and is punished with nemesis” (Subba Rao: 82).
Aeschylus says that men learn through suffering. Jocelin also suffers the
nemesis and regenerates into a true tragic figure. In ‘the spire’ the pattern of
agon (conflict), Pathos (suffering) and epiphany (revelation) are vividly
present. Jocelin achieves, like King Lear, a new awareness, a new humility
and compassion, as he is purged of his ego. Indeed, Jocelin emerges in a
heroic light in the death bed and achieves a true tragic stature who can be
compared with great tragic figures like Oedipus and King Lear.
The medieval setting of the novel is true to the history itself. Golding,
unlike his earlier novels, has not based the story on any intertextuality. The
structure of the spire is modeled on the Salisbury Cathedral near which
Golding had lived for many years. The constructional details of Joceline’s
spire are similar to that of Salisbury. The spire in Salisbury is a little over
400 feet and the highest in England. It is octagonal, strengthened by iron
bonds and has no orthodox foundations. It stands on four pillars, and
surmounted by a capstone and a cross.
History reveals that great dangers were involved in building the
mighty structure. The names of the two principal characters in the book,
Jocelin and Roger, are those of two early bishops whose bodies are buried in
the cathedral. There are hanging stones which can be compared with the
Stonehenge. Golding has adopted the details of the construction to create his
own myth of man’s fall and redemption in a manner Milton created his
masterpiece, The Paradise Lost, from the allusion of the Bible. Golding
106 himself accepts that the purpose of his novel is to write about “a cathedral of
the mind” (Subba Rao: 86).
The progress of the story tells how making of the vision a reality
entails human tragedy, and development of human consciousness, slow but
sure. Further, it progresses on three time scales working together. The
construction of the building follows linear time scale. The more the
structure gains height, the more Jocelin gains knowledge. The technique of
the project is true to the medieval pattern. Then he discovers the tainted
money involved in the enterprise earned by his aunt Lady Alison, a fallen
woman, long before the novel opens. This revelation forms his first progress
of understanding. The diagram of prayer turns out to be a phallic image as it
is sexual energy coupled with faith that creates the work. The third time
system is connected with Joceline’s recognition of guilt from the thoughts of
his past events. Like Ralph’s weeping recognition of the sin of the world,
Jocelin learns new lesson at every levels from his unstoppable memories.
Golding wants to destroy artificial patterns. He represents himself
theologically, as what used to be loosely termed as Deist. He believes in
human evil; he also believes that human being can get back to the lost
paradise by clutching the holiness that lies scattered among the fragments of
our world. There are saintly people like Simon who, like the incense sticks
leave fragrance of goodness, themselves sacrificing their lives. The wisdom
Simon offers that the beast is within us is disturbing and negative. But his
life and death offer some hope in the pervasive gloom inasmuch that one
good man at least has been found who is capable of redeeming the world.
The writer consciously constructs a religious mythopoeia in the
background of spiritual void and moral relativism of the post–war era. He is
disillusioned with man’s myth of progress as it results in war giving rise to
man’s inhumanity to man. The Theatre of the Absurd represents the attitude
107 of man most genuinely as life is absurd and meaningless. Martin Esslin
observes the post–war atmosphere as: “the decline of religious faith was
masked until the end of the second world war by the substitute religious of
faith in progress, nationalism and various totalitarian fallacies” (23).
But Golding does not despair in absurdity. Although his novels deal
with depravity of man, he cares deeply about the condition of human life,
and shows great compassion for men who suffer and men who commit evil.
He does not turn away from life in disgust: On the contrary, he is committed
to explore actual life in all its good and bad actions to prove dramatically
the authenticity of his religious view point. The characters in his fiction
prove the dignity and importance of human action and through their action
they search a pattern and what they learn is neither man nor can the world
be made to fit in any rational formula. They make us all look into the world
of binary oppositions, conveying the message that we cannot turn our faces
away from the evil around us. The author insists that our actions should be
morally right to achieve a right ends. Other wise, what seems to be good as
it is thought to be Wellsian progressivism or Victorian scientific superiority,
will turn into a fatal blow on humanity.
The edition of the Lord of the Flies by Faber Company was
something absurd and it, according to Golding, was uncalled for as however
we boast of our superior knowledge of the world or art, judgment of its true
merit might not be as easy as common people think it to be. A person of
Golding’s stature was not easy to understand by common people as great
truth seems implausible or else, why and how shall it be great truth! It
reminds Robert Browning’s great truth in times of doubt and uncertainty of
Victorian period in Rabbi Ben Ezra as, “A man’s reach should exceed his
grasp, Or else, what’s heaven for?”(Browning 3).Our limit is limitless and
Browning’s robust faith grew on him with age and his lived experiences of
108 life. He, unlike Tennyson, did not come to terms with his age and treaded to
a mystic life brushing aside all doubts of his age.
Golding too is very obliquely putting the same truth that truth and
untruth are curiously mixed in the world and one has to discern the truth
only at an appropriate time achieving appropriate height:
“Then one day I tried to explain that it wasn’t that I didn’t want or
didn’t know what he wanted. I was shy , that was all-and found
myself falling into the measure as easily as sipping into something
loose, and he gave a great shout which echoed in the bookroom”(DT
60).
What people celebrated for Golding was not at all fascinating for him as he
was above such petty name and fame knowing certain that he moved into
something loose and it’s a blasphemy of truth for him, which he further
makes clear in the following lines: “Since human law cannot be perfect, one
must be able to bend and turn. They do not understand this. There is a
passion for what they call “honesty” in some parts of the world but it is
always limited to the people who claim it”(65).
The words echo charm and power of a universal truth that comes out
from a legendary soul accounting for a lofty system of thought, at once
religious and philosophical, moral and social, with its message for the
modern world which is plagued in multiple vices and distortions gliding
away from the path of religion. Jaded readers could not understand the
implications of his series of novels for his novels were free from any
trappings of any particular band or ism.
The mythopoeia Golding has built through his fiction is more
obsessed with evil than good. Lord of the Flies and Darkness Visible show
the civilization on the point of breaking down. Man’s self–conscious
109 attempt to keep the order results in disorder. Socio–political systems such as
socialism and communism turned into totalitarian regime. Empirical science
and concepts like rationalism and liberal humanism are devised to gratify
man’s emotional and egotistical drives. Ralph’s longing to return to the
adult world is an illusion made clear by the irony of the air–battle in the sky
and dead parachutist – “a sign came down from the world of grows ups”.
(LF: 118).
The arrival of the naval officer at the end as dues ex machina is also
a farce. His trim cruiser, the sub–machine gun, his revolver and row of guilt
buttons are only more sophisticated substitutes for the war–paint and sticks
of Jack and his followers. He too is chasing men in order to kill, and the
painted urchins mock the absurd civilized attempt to hide the power of evil.
Here the gimmick of rescue is to reinforce the idea that evil cannot be done
away with by another evil. In the end, the Edenic Island, as it is set on fire,
presents the dreadful picture of cosmic anarchy mocking the efforts of man
to master it. The love tragedy of Sammy and Beatrice is enacted in an ugly
and inauspicious back ground in England as a recognizably modern world.
It is a world in which, on the grand scale, the love between human beings
has failed. In absence of any right moral purpose life has been a formless
business. The question of right ends applies even to the ontological quest for
order for Sammy and Matty. Jocelin and Colley show how formal religion
can, in the name of order, mislead one to the pit of evil. Jocelin builds a vast
human cellarage out of his own ego. Man in his microcosmic world seeks a
pattern and order and faces chaos. Golding’s world as with Melville and
Conrad look like a place where all human endeavors seem an ignoble
exercise. The reason is clearly shown in Pincher’s mythic struggle. Pincher
represents once again Golding’s Everyman:
110 Pincher is an embodiment of a proposition about human nature, rather
than an individual; in so far we recognize greed as a sin to which we are
prone, we must say, “yes, we are like that”(Hynes: 132). The Pincher’s
world is a sorry specimen entailing a terrible waste of man’s intellectual and
creative power as it springs from a negative and perverse outlook.
Golding affirms in the Hot Gates, “In Pythagoras and Copernicus, the
religion, science and poetry meet”(31-40);in the same vein Sammy, like
these two scientists, found a bridge between the two as there is no division
in knowledge-all leading to one common pool of infinity. Steiner in the
Philosophy of Freedom states that, “Dualism is based on a misunderstanding
of what we call knowledge. It is intuition related to mental pictures that
overcomes dualism” (97-116).Sammy wanted to make a bridge out of
binary opposites, out of two differential characters into an everlasting
process of cyclical change. He abandons Beatrice for frigidity and gets
locked into Taffy’s sensuality and caught in the darkness of woumb like
closet by Dr. Halde, the Nazi psychologist.
In A Moving Target, he was, ‘an ageing novelist, floundering in all
the complexities of 20th-century living, all the muddle of part beliefs’
(Kermode) and hence, he has created the Lord of the Flies as a kind of novel
in which one can directly participate and find resemblance of his own child
hood or adolescent nature in one or the other way let alone the adult hood
for, adulthood is the extension of the same childhood under the mask of the
socializing influences. The conch as the symbol of power and authority has
in itself double fanged teeth and the orifice is maize like structure, not
something straight. Hence, socialization does not grantee us humane
behavior. The most intriguing character is certainly Simon, the epileptic,
visionary sage of the book who goes to visit the monster and discovers the
secret. Jack and Ralph both belong to two different political outfits, one in
111 favour of democracy and the other for an authoritarian rule like Hitler.
Piggy, detached from reality, is an intellectual. The spectacles symbolise his
power of reason amid natural chaos and disorder. Simon’s extraordinary
visionary power is the cause of his death.
There are Ralphs galore in the world who throng the corridor of
power in parliaments, frame laws only to be lost in the maze of conch and
the world for them is incomprehension like the babbles of the king fisher
bird as in the SP. People have since been wielding the conch and trying to
maintain order against the predatory tribes of Jack. The world has remained
the same as it was the band of orgies, with war paint, continues pig-killing
or rather killing Piggy! The rampant adolescent crimes all over the world in
this century which we all come across everyday is a pointer that the Lord of
the Flies is as valid today as ever as it reminds that we can not be
complacent of having done enough , be it socilising the boys or moralising
the adults, at any point of time since, “Golding's experiment on a desert
island now has crept into every sphere, especially in post modern scenario
of virtual image in as much as the younger generation is glued to emptying
the ‘shelves of plasma TV sets and iPads in Curries and pocketing hair gel
in Superdrug”(Peter Conrad).
The hunt for the boys has replaced to hunt for consumerism. The
mask and paint is now camouflaged under ugly fundamentalism, only to be
satiated not by pig's blood, but by the innocent band of ‘Neanderthals’ who
manage to survive till today. Golding, of course lamented the peril of the
innocence in The Inheritors. The signal fire for rescue is to draw the
attention of the horrible daemons, who are constitutionally so designed to
join the chorus of the snarl and destructive delight. The naval officer
reminds the pack of the boys as to their solemn responsibility as being
British but what rescue does he make who himself has to go for human
112 carnival? The author shows how we are deluded from one state to another
state of evils thinking and justifying each times our deeds as morally
correct. How far our parents and teachers have the right motivating power to
civilize us is in serious question as they, more often than not, resort to
shouting, yelling and batons to inculcate civilizing influence among the
kids. Social Darwinism functions as a ‘being’ behind the child hood
innocence, and their infantile play is the rehearsal for ‘becoming’ as crafty
‘Homo sapiens’ to annihilate the innocent pre-historic men.
The title The Inheritor is a pun following the biblical allusion of the
Christ‘s ‘Sermon on the Mountain’ in which the phrase ‘to inherit the earth’,
is supposes to be by those, who are pure in heart; where as it is inherited by
the horrible demons, blood-thirsty, crafty homo sapiens imbued by the
Victorian values of getting and spending and thus, create a warring society
of killers of the meek. Neanderthals love human being but Homo sapiens
hate them. Lok is the last survivor, howling in grief for his lost kins and it is
touching! Lok looks at the new people “with terrible love” (INH191).So, we
inherit a world of the myth of progress and the price is terrible. Adam’s
disobedience is the myth of progress that annihilated the innocence and it
was his, what can be termed as rationalistic values by the scientists.
Golding’s theurgy has put rationality in question for epistemological
analysis.
The novel artistically traced the evolution of human consciousness.
The story is fall of man and introduction of sin in this world. Like Milton,
Golding too points out man’s relation with god and universe. The
Neanderthal people had no knowledge of good and evil. Testing the
forbidden fruit is the knowledge of good and evil, the taste of rationality and
man passes from primal innocence to rational consciousness and guilt.
113 Theurgy is to beak down the illusion of human being while reminding them
that each one is his/her own god ,but distanced from nature and truth.
In radio broadcast Golding says, ‘The boys are suffering from the
terrible disease of being human’ and at the beginning of the Lord of the
Flies the author shows, “a light at the end of the tunnel” (7) when Simon
first appears on the scene of the book. The terrible disease is the assigned lot
of humanity in the God’s world and at the beginning hope is shown in the
form of light which would soon be faded as jack and Ralph will have
involved into a political battle of superiority. Hint of goodness is followed
by regression to barbarity due to the fear of the unknown, little having been
aware that the unknown, the evil is within.
Golding’s life and message have been very bold to the world. He has
seen many wonderful institutions, customs, people, and religion around the
world and travelled all great nations including India. He considered his
Nobel Prize and international recognition just a matter of chance and
nothing more than a coincidence. As a religious man, he could not but
consider Divine intervention in it, but the magic is that:
Once we read a text it leaves an impact on our mind and some of
them are unforgettable as they at once stir a spring in our mind of
ceaseless fountain of inspiration. The controversy of Golding’s
publication of the first book what bagged him the Nobel Prize could,
otherwise, have remained in cold basket… (Collier).
But it is difficult to erase any great work of art; it may be eclipsed
temporarily, for the ceaseless fountain of inspiration, his theurgy within
which inspires one and all slowly, yet surely: “it is deeper, more profound.
The theurgist is the Internal Christ of every human that comes into the
World. Within the human being, the theurgist is the shining Dragon of
114 Wisdom, which is the Ray from where the very innermost emanated”
(Aunweo). Vivekananda gives the clearest perception in this context
precisely:
Light comes to individuals through the conscious efforts of their
intellect; it comes, slowly though, to the whole race through
unconscious percolations. The philosophers show the volitional
struggles of great minds; history reveals the silent process of
permeation through which truth is absorbed by the masses (4:258).
Golding’s contribution has been this unconscious percolation to the masses
through the characters and settings. Plato, the early theurgist, inscribed the
word that no one should enter his room who is not a geometer (geometer who believes in abstraction).Golding devoutly followed Plato’s idea of
theurgy. Arieka, Golding’s theurgist, could connect herself its power time to
time as she gives her confession, “I burst into tears and did not know
why?”(139) and she further answers that, “I do now. I was the slave of god
or the idea of god. You see how learned I have become with all my reading
in the bookroom! Yes! It is Plato’s, this idea” (DT 139).
She wrote a verse in hexameter about Helen and the Corinthian asked
Ionides as to who wrote that in admiration .Seeing Ionides pale and silent,
Arieka wanted to answer, “To know how to make hexameters was the only
way to prevent the Pythia from being killed by some particularly strong
communication” (DT: 142).Here, the strong communication is muddled
headedness of people who hold the best position yet lack conviction. They
speak in cynic term like the Ionides. Hexameter is a magic, an inspired
communication that charms every heart and for that one requires the art of
Theurgy what Golding has affirmed in the context of creating timeless art
whether it is poetry or novel , “There is a mystery about both trades-a
mystery in every sense of that ancient word" (Belief and Creativity: 192).
115 In the banquet hall Arieka heard four words spoken outside the room
and she was sure that it was spoken by some man of substance with ‘good
and sufficient reason to say them’(DT: 142) and the words echoes, “It was
the ferryman”(142).Arieka heard it ringing and she was fearful. It was
indicative of when someone perceives the message of his/her scanty days in
this world and sooner this frail body is to be laid; one gets a queer feeling,
an unknown fear!
That the works of William Golding has played magic on this earth is
replete with bare proof. Ionides asked Arieka to write a letter to the
Proprietor of Rome but she only agreed to sign with her given name
“Pythia” on a letter written by anyone and later she thought it won’t be
proper, “I don’t think that would be proper. Besides, someone might use it”
and the reason is, “Well-you know-magic” (155).The word Pythia is a
source of inspiration and emanates from the divine origin. So, the sign
carries with it its all compassing power of magic that can undo evils of the
earth that is engulfed with black lightning and corruption of all sorts.
Vivekananda observed that:
In acquiring knowledge we make generalizations based upon our
observations. Then comes inference and conclusion. The knowledge
of the internal nature of man, peoples mind and thought can never be
analyzed until the power of observation is gained from within. It is
going on with every one but the powerful one has more accurate
result to show that relates to everyone’s experience (1:129).
The author’s mind is the instrument of observation as, “Truth stands its own
justification without any evidence. External facts are easy to observe and
generalize. But for internal world there is no instrument to judge or observe
(Vivekananda 1:133).
116 Fantastic and carnivalesque elements are taken resort to, not overtly,
but as part of his theurgist approach and they are not to be locked into the
mundane, but to stride beyond that. The beast in Lord of the Flies is
fantastic element which unsettles the boys with its phantom presence. Lok’s
perception of the new people is an epitome of innocence. When his own
family members are killed, tortured, he still could not resort to violence as it
seems that they needed an evolution to be crafty and cunning. The double
death of Marin is again on mundane level is not plausible. Mystical
experience of Jocelin and Sammy bring them a rebirth into the theurgistic
realm. The miracle of The Spire makes possible an inhuman task of erecting
the tallest spire possible violating all calculations of civil engineering and
still it remains in Salisbury in its eternal glory.
An apocalyptic flame of the Darkness Visible is the fine examples of
fantastic elements. Matty questions from the beginning-What am I for? With
a burnt, ugly face he got to suffer in his life. Pedigree used him to attract
young pretty boys into his room which was quite ignominious. Mysterious
glass ball and the books loaded with knowledge appear before him
symbolically as the way out to his quest for self. The multiple mirrors
reflect his own ugliness and the barrenness of the Australian bush. He
accepts self- laceration which starts with the resolution to remain silent, for
he wanted to be loved. Finally, self-torture in the Australian desert brings
him the vision of the unity since all human endeavour and
“The end and
aim of all sciences is to find the unity ,the one out of which the manifold is
being manufactured, that one existing as many”(Vivekananda 1:133).
The Darkness Visible is oxymoronic, violating the established binary
opposition of good and evil. Again, the novel is mythopoeia, dialectically
structured, presents realistic surface, elude definitive interpretation and
resist closure. It is centered on other worldly simple characters. Matty
117 appears as facial disfigurement which makes him taciturn. Golding is
romantic against all bleak disillusionment, and as a religious author grapples
with religion and miracle.
He turned postmodernist in Darkness Visible in 70s when it began to
be debated in intellectual circles. In all his novels he employs an
epistemological commentary on the fragmented and indeterminate nature of
reality.
He
interrogated
contemporary
issues
like
English
class,
totalitarianism, which are termed as ‘post modern condition’ in
postmodernism. The Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors raise the universal
question of humankind’s barbarity with the historical occurrence of such
behavior to Jews during holocaust.
Distinguished critic, Virginia Tiger, argues that his writings explore
themes of vision, mystery, human sin and guilt. Drawing upon her own
personal recollections of conversations with Golding and quoting from her
correspondence with him; she shows how structure supports content in this
extraordinary body of work. One of the proof Golding’s theurgy is that
millions of people find inspiration in his fiction; already the LF is included
in syllabus in degree programme in every country of the world and some of
the noted scholars voice their inspired feelings as to why Golding is so
special: “If we do not want to lose ourselves, we need to decide and draw
our own reading path – our ‘sendero luminoso’, free from all manipulative
media. We have to find ways to bypass the wall between us and the Artist to
find traces of that “divine inspiration” or to hear the Gods speaking to us.
This saddles us up with the responsibility for the choice of our readings, for
the development of our own soul” (Collier).
One of the important techniques used in Golding is a ‘coup de grace’
which is is a strong finishing stroke or a decisive way of ending something.
The loan phrase from French is used in all sorts of contexts. For instance,
118 it’s often used in reference to competitive sports to describe a move or a
score that effectively ends the match, and it’s often used in reference to
works of art, describing a novel touch that gives the work a strong finish.
The specific structure of a Golding fiction involves binaries in different
levels, but at the end of the plot in all his fiction reverses the point of view
and the expectations of the readers. Towards the end of each fiction the
reader moves from the protagonist's point of view to another character's
point of view on the same situation. The two perspectives are connected, not
be contradictory to each other but to synthesize them into a third option for
persuading the readers into a world beyond the binary. The making such
contradictory world Golding creates a panopticon structure to see how the
readers connects the bridge between the apparently contradictory
perspectives and while accepting such paradoxes of existence as symptoms
of the spiritual world they reconnect them to ultimate destiny of man’s
single existence amid all such babble of life.
All the points of view are correct to some degree, but none of them is
unparallel and all encompassing. The boys’ world is a microcosm of the
macrocosmic world and the style adopted is straightforward while avoiding
difficult language, round about descriptions, and too much philosophical
abstractions. Much of the novel is allegorical, meaning that the characters
and objects in the novel are infused with symbolic significance that conveys
the fiction’s central themes and ideas. In portraying the various ways in
which the characters face challenging situations he shows how the
‘situatedness’ help them learn to adapt and react to their transformation.
The sea-trilogy hinges upon the generic limits reflecting the moral
concern and interest of the author. The characters are cast in their own
variety of socio-historical condition who could undergo a journey of life or
the voyage through their own limits questioning their ontological search of
119 life, their purpose of being. The basic question that originated in the Lord of
the Flies about the nature of the evil, the nature of identity of human being
is delved deeper in the series of novels, setting each one in altogether
incomparable settings of time-space-causation and culminating in the
Double Tongue via the sea trilogy. It explores the potentiality of ‘writing
about writing’ and shows how created world could be as real as or more real
than the reality, which is a hyper-reality. Both reality and hyper reality are
to be accepted as one is dependent upon the other.
Should we have to stop here or make some progress, here is the
question put forward by the author and perhaps, here, lies the power of
judgment of a human being what to accrue from here. If we stop, life will
become static and stagnant. Necessarily, we have to look beyond. If we shun
away to do our part, we will be locked in some dead end like the boys world
in a deserted island and would wait for some wise man like the captain of
the British Army to rescues us. The author was a staunch believer in
Christianity and all the scriptures of the world mention that we need to go
beyond this world of good and bad, beyond this dichotomy. If we give up
this search of the beyond, we regress to animality. This search, this inquiry,
makes one religious and Golding has been called as a religious novelist by
all his critics. The boys world is a reflection of animal world too as they
could not read the message of Simon, the Christ figure ,and remained
happily engaged in hunting and food gathering like the nomads.
Face-paint comes later as memories of civilisation appear in their
mind as their atavistic quest following Jung’s theory. The same instinctual
yearning for blood is shown in The Inheritors in wiping out the
Neanderthals by the Homo sapiens. Simon, the innocent, is killed, but jack
was hesitant to kill first as he possessed both the qualities of ancient wisdom
of innocence and modern rationality of excelling by annihilating: “here,
120 invisible yet strong was the taboo of the old life” (56) and the society begins
to disintegrate at this point. The mask is the nature of human being what
he/she keeps putting on while playing different roles, which at the same
time, takes different colors and dimensions, thus, hiding or exposing our
original divinity. Jack’s first hunt of the pig, his primal primitivism, is in
sharp contrast with the rule of law set by the sound of the conch. But the
rules keep losing its hold and validity as the story unfolds from innocence to
barbarity. During the journey in the unnamed island an ambivalent situation
appears with the conch’s existing authority and its transgression by the same
boys, same place and at the same time. Ralph, the human rationalist, alone
could sustain eroding rules quite for sometime till it eventually declares its
complete death with the tragic demise of Piggy as the omniscient voice
touchingly states, “The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to
knees; the conch exploded into thousand white fragments and ceased to
exist”(200).
The conch breaks but the white fragments remain on the earth as
differentiated sensibility which creates the magic of bringing the boys’
sensibility of the loss of innocence whence a new germ of law and order has
to begin afresh till it also undergoes the same process of decay and
regeneration. The white pieces symbolize the essence of purity as Golding,
the true Christ, reminds the Bible’s emphasis on purity of heart to realise
god. Purity is personified through Simon’s life as he is deeply selfintrospecting Christ figure who experiences hallucinations, faintness the
way the biblical prophets experienced and came out as transformed person
to show light to the world.
Simon is the only figure who could understand the nuances of evil
and explained it in concrete terms, “may be there is a beast; may be it’s only
us” (LF 80), but the mundane world slaughtered him before they could
121 understand him the way Christ who was free of original sin was crucified.
Ralph was the only rationalist and civilized one to be left alone to explain
what went wrong and he performs the Theurgy of reflecting the world of
binary, the death of Piggy and Simon and make the boys world, nay! The
whole world realizes the source of evil. Ralph, despite being civilized,
occasionally regresses to his primal instincts. The readers are shown that the
elected leaders are in all likeliness are to regress in a circumstance of
“terrible disease of being human” and Ralph weeps, “Ralph wept for the
end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of
the true, wise friend called Piggy”( Baker, Talk 130-70).
Golding is an evolutionist though he has not overtly mentioned
anywhere, yet his quest for the pre-historic man in the Inheritors is a case in
point. He has read between the lines of textuality of history of H. G. Wells
and attempted to re -define the historicity of the text in the light of his
evolutionist spirit. The great ancient evolutionist, Patanjali, declared that
“the true, secret of evolution is the manifestation of perfection which is
already in every being (qtd.in. Vivekananda 1:129). We struggle to express
this perfection. Ignorance is the root cause of all these miseries as we know
not the proper way of manifesting it. “Competition for life, or sex
gratification are only momentary, unnecessary extraneous effects, caused by
ignorance” (1:293).Hence, all the protagonists in the fiction are only the
types of larger human society who have chosen their own path of
momentary mode out of ignorance and they all subject to the process of
purification because, “The theory of karma is that we suffer for our good or
bad deeds, and the whole scope of philosophy is to reach the glory of man.
All the scriptures sing the glory of man, of the souls, and then, in the same
breathe, they preach karma” (1:293).
122 In Free Fall we have three fold works: evil actions, good actions and
mixed actions. These actions are more manifested in proper environment as
the power of environment has a great power to check karma. In the Lord of
the Flies, the boys’ world is placed in a nameless island of challenging
environment. It is the expression of struggle for existence and survival of
the fittest. “Karma follows the laws of causation. Our universe is
characterized by space-time-causation. This universe is only a part of
infinite existence moulded into space-time-causation. Beyond this universe,
no cassation as it is (Vivekananda 1: 84).Hence, the inevitability of struggle
for human being percolates through the fictional characters. The struggle
was two fold: one against the nature and the other against their individual
human nature. Curiously, the boys of a Christian coir school in England
with a similar pattern of education and socialization effect, so called “a pack
of British boys…” (213) progressed or regressed there quite unmatchingly
and their maturing effect is quite at variance. This is the most powerful
magic in the novel that attracts and works through the readers mind
succinctly. Influence of civilisation or political authority stood missing. The
author does not just show barbarity, war and lawlessness, but he shows the
innate goodness as well.
Simon fought against the fears, ignorance and took all the troubles of
the island. He never worshipped the pleasure of hunting the pigs or
ravenous, sadistic pleasure of torturing the small boys-the ‘littluns’ and thus,
for him the door of hell and the gate of heaven was so close that it made him
ever composed and his frequent fainting or hallucination might rightly be
termed as the state of Samadhi in Vedic or Sanskrit term.
The octogenarian Theurgist, William Golding, standing with white
beard, visionary eyes moistened with divine glow has reflected the essences
of his life long Theurgy in the banquet speech:
123 What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and
that if anything it has been thrust out from the side which least
expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we
know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I
might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid
you to examine it. If there was no beginning then infinite time has
already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we
are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable to
postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer
apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious
are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical
position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles
inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them
outside it. Both, in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus quia
absurdum est. Glory be to God in the highest. You will get no
reductive pessimism from me. (Nobel Lecture).
The shifting point of view is misconstrued by many which is,
otherwise, to enable the readers to arrive at universal optimism. The naval
officer at the end shifts the point of view of the novel. Golding is an
exceptional craftsman in modern time in using unusual and striking literary
devices. Each of the novels is governed by a massive metaphorical structure
to assert something permanent and significant about human nature. Hence
the metaphor turns into “gimmicks” (Gindin: 67).
The shift from metaphor to gimmick raises questions about the unity
and meaning of the novel.
In one way the gimmick is aesthetically
unsatisfactory and weans the force of the metaphor. But in another sense, it
qualifies the metaphor. It questions how far the dichotomy of good and evil
works through human being. Gimmicks are qualification on the universality
124 of the metaphors and “Golding’s metaphors can all be read as orthodox and
traditional Christian statements about the nature of man” (weeks: 174).
In the post war ear of spiritual disillusionment and moral vacuum post
modernist writing expresses critical anxieties about the state of the
individual and existential absurdities of the age. The writers acknowledge as
like Golding, the existence of evil. But Golding, in his effort to diagnose the
malady of the present world, has abstained from any reductivity. As a
theurgist he did not also believe in establishing a new mode of existence
outside this cosmos. His idea was a perfection of human-divine existence
within the cosmos, within the historical dimension of human existence. His
aim was to preserve the creative aspect of our intellectual union with a
higher, divine principle. Ralph, the believer of democracy and order, lets
himself loose to hunting in the face of disorder and blood lust among the
boys. “Ralph was full of fright and apprehension and pride” (LF: 140) when
he first kills a boar. He also joins the mime of pig-hunt and chanting ritual,
“Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!” (LF: 142) and he
“faces the existential dilemma as he is tempted ‘to take a place in this
demented but partly secure society’ (Subba Rao 14).
Again, at the end Ralph overcomes his dilemma. The fleeting picture
of the strange glamour of the beach recedes with his tears. Ralph learns
from experience as he “Wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of
man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true wise friend called
Piggy”. (LF: 248). But Golding’s suggestion is that only belief won’t solve;
one has to realise through constant endeavour as Pythia or Arieka, and all
the major characters have exemplified in his fiction. Soul is immortal and it
can be realised only through the transaction of life and self-knowledge.
Arieka affirms her immortality:
125 If two women have died, well it meant that She, the Pythia, had not
died-I cannot explain it because I never understood the transaction
myself. What of myself? The ordinary-let us say –Athenian may have
had his belief in the Pythia easily reconciled with its illogic because he only
thought about the question a few times in his life, and notably if he had a
question to ask (118).
When we follow Sammy’s path of going easy way of gratification, we
fall; where as Simon or Matty attains vision through life’s ordeal and
turning out as scapegoat and holy fool. But Sammy or Joceline believed in
what they were doing. Their conscious effort made the miracle, or the spire
could not have been built in both blood and beauty, Joceline’s folly
originates from his strong and unflinching faith. It was so strong that its
destructive powers amount to what is virtually a blasphemous travesty of
faith. Jocelin and Sammy are liberated and so does Iomnides. Ionides was
preoccupied with the question of the age old freedom of the city, Delphi
against the Roman tyranny and he himself pronounces the carnal of all
human endeavours that we seek freedom through the source of power and,
“The realities of power, my dear. Our power is spiritual” (DT82)
Arieka leaves same panoptic message that Theurgy exists and it plays
its role beyond our consciousness, But I –how did I view myself? Did I
believe in what I was doing? Or rather, since I was doing nothing, did I
believe in what someone, something was doing to me (118)”? Pythia’s
‘forte’ is symbolic of Golding’s works as Pythia while living in the forte
spoke in single tongue the absolute truth of god and Golding created the
magic world of a single vision of the world never resorting to changing it
under any mundane criticism. The truth was certainly simple and some were
quite happy to have it in the present world which is made clear in the
Double Tongue through the voice of Ionides, “In any case, my dear, we
126 have some completely satisfied customers. I’m not sure really that your
“forte” doesn’t lie in dealing with the simple rather than the complex “(98)!
Immediately after her encounter with the monster an omniscient voice
questions Arieka, “Well, Arieka, what did you expect? A god, that’s what
you expected. They vanished and there was grief before the void. The void”
(DT162).
Pythia’s Theurgy came to fruition as she remembers the god’s
presence, “So that was how His holiness came home. But, as he said, he
wasn’t home. And the little that had really come did not last long. I saw him
dwindle. Presently it became plain that he would dwindle right away”
(DT163).And this Theurgy can’t be grasped with time-space-causation. It’s
timeless what Golding called cosmic,
“I understood that old First lady I
had known so many years ago. Sixty? more, I think. I have lost count. But
the world has changed. Sixty will do” (DT164).
Is there any final finding of Golding’s theurgy? Arieka still finds
herself entangled with the key with double labrys and when she pulls the
draw strings she finds, “There was a double door behind them”
(DT164).Arieka reconciled with her life as whatever happened is all a
matter of past and life has to go on. Everyone has some limitations and that
has to be accepted in the world of binary. At last came the day came when
she received a letter from the Archon of Athens expressing the city’s wish to
erect a stone image of her along the altars of Mars as she served the god
Apollo as the Pythia .Immediately she remembered the same metaphor-void
– that continued to haunt her, and her reply was, “ I asked that rather than
an image of me they should erect a simple altar and inscribed: “TO THE
UNKNOWN GOD”(DT165).Hence, the answer to Theurgy is indefinableunknown god!
127 Any writing or creative works must be more than intellectual
gymnastics unless it can make such changes that the struggling people of
this planet get to practical help in improving their cause substantially with
more or less success. Golding is a man who has manifested the power of
Theurgy and his vision of life and thus, stands as more penetrating than the
vast majority of scholars and thinkers who philosophised so many
conjectures, yet impacting so little.
What has Golding done to the total result? Has he made any miracle?
The answer comes through Arieka, “No, not really, I can contribute to the
process that is all. Others must move him-them” (DT57).Perhaps, he has set
his Theurgy rolling for human being to seek after the Truth and it’s time to
abandoned his rough magic of artistic creation and then -‘music, still solemn
music of eternity!
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GOLDING’S
PANOPTIC VISION
131 The Panopticon as defined in the free dictionary is a type of prison
building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy
Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to
observe (opticon) all (pan) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to
tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect
has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience” and Bentham himself
described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over
mind "(Encyclopedia).
The idea was derived from the plan of a military school in Paris
designed for easy supervision. It was initially conceived as a solution to the
complexities involved in the handling of large numbers of people when put
together. It was intended to be cost effective involving a fewer staff during
his time. Design of the structure was such that the watchmen cannot be seen.
Thus, all the time watching was not needed as the watched would be
watching each other.
Bentham devoted a large part of his time and almost his whole
fortune to promote the construction of a prison based on his scheme but the
design did not come to fruition during his life time, but the design was
invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for
modern ‘disciplinary’ societies and their pervasive inclination to observe
and normalize. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical
structures like the army, schools, hospitals and factories have evolved
through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon. The notoriety of the
design today (although not its lasting influence in architectural realities)
stems from Foucault's famous analysis of it (Encyclopedia).
The term is used as metaphor in contemporary social circles. It is said
that technology has allowed for the deployment of panoptic structures
132 invisibly throughout society. Surveillance by closed-circuit television
(CCTV) cameras in public spaces is an example of a technology that brings
the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace. Furthermore, a
number of cities in the United Kingdom, including Middleborough, Bristol,
Brighton and London have recently added loudspeakers to a number of their
existing CCTV cameras. They can transmit the voice of a camera supervisor
to issue audible messages to the public. Similarly the system of internet
practice is suggestive of a panopticon form of observation across the globe.
The cases of IP address hacking and stealing others material is now a
common practice. Super surveillance systems are now being used in warfare
to collect information from the opponent country.
Thus, the panoptic vision is a kind of system in technology that
describes how computer technology makes work more visible. Critics and
scholars have used the term in the context of observing and observed. There
are quite a few examples as, “The 2009 film "Law Abiding Citizen" uses the
panopticon, both architecturally and conceptually, in a Foucauldian
interpretation of the power struggle inherent in a system of constant
observation” (Encyclo. Foucault).
Michel Foucault used the term more generally as a metaphor in
describing Western society. Angela also includes a critique of the
Panopticon prison system during the Siberian segment of Nights at the
Circus. In her 2008 young adult novel The Disreputable History of Frankie
Landau-Banks, E. Lockhart has the protagonist talk about reading an
excerpt from Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish in which he
"uses the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for Western society and its
emphasis on normalization and observation" (Encyclopedia). She goes on to
bring up the panopticon again throughout the course of the book.
133 Golding is variously known as fabulist, anti-realist or philosophical
novelist, but his work is based on his own war-time experience and
powerful observation of irrationality in the world. He draws upon the rich
literary tradition only to undo the smug religious and scientific superiority
of the age. He undertook a serious Aeschylean preoccupation with human
tragedy to get at the root of the disease of humanity instead of describing the
symptoms. He has avoided being reductive like Marx, Freud or Darwin in
the west and attempted “to scrape the labels off things, to take nothing for
granted, to show the irrational where it exists” (Green78).
The task is to break down all illusions and his creed is that – ‘know
yourself’. Hence, self–knowledge, the knowledge of god and evil with the
natural chaos of existence without forcing an artificial pattern that form part
of the whole, the idea of unity, is the only hope for humanity. To explain
and expound the validity of the knowledge of good and evil and how are
they related as a dichotomy through the select works of Golding is the
burden of this thesis.
Charles Monteith, the editor at Faber who helped Golding to get his
first book published was very critical about certain parts of the Lord of the
Flies. He persuaded Golding to scrap all references of god or anything
related to the divine especially to scrap the Theophanic (the manifestation of
a God) experience of the boy Simon. Golding Conceded to what he said
only to get his book published. He was quite unhappy at this as the world
would be deprived of his panoptic vision what is saintly figure Simon
represented and what was the need of the hour for the world to have a close
look at how it’s functioning in post modern world of only surface, no depth.
He would, much later, explain to an audience that he felt it as a betrayal of
the Divine and that he regretted it deeply.
134 The Double Tongue, published posthumously, is Golding’s answer to
many vexed issues in general and his displeasure of scraping of the LF in
particular. Arieka, the protagonist in the Double Tongue, as well as Golding,
in their eighties remember life from vantage point of lived experiences. The
book opens with a strange recollection of her own birth: “Blazing light and
warmth, undifferentiated and experiencing themselves” (1). Golding too
claimed he remembered his birth and jotted it down in his journal as a color
experience: “Red mostly, but everywhere, and a sense of wind blowing,
buffering and there was much light”. Thus, it is rightly noted that:
“Both Arieka and Golding, remembering something which cannot be
remembered that not only tag them as one of a kind but set them apart in
their exceptionality ...The question ‘if Golding is Arieka, who is Ionides?’
is answered as “It is of course Charles Monteith, the man who saved Lord of
the Flies out of the wastepaper basket. And in that sense The Double
Tongue is also Golding’s homage to his Muse” ( Macumbeira DT). Thus, if
Ionides is Monteith then Golding’s assessment is right when he says, “So
Ionides, cynic, atheist, contriver, liar, believed in god!”(DT136).
A Study of Golding fiction confirms according to Mr. Stone that the
author:
“Is caught in the ineluctable paradox between pessimism and
morality; therefore, his view of man combines the duality of his
vision. As a pessimist, Golding believes man is selfish, willful,
egocentric and morally irresponsible. As a moralist, he perceives a
faint hope that a change in behaviour and a re-awakening of moral
responsibility is possible if man is forced to see into himself” (stone).
The series of his novels shows man's destructive actions out of his free will
and a possible way out through self-knowledge that comes after huge
135 suffering. Golding hopes the reader will be persuaded to alter his own
behavior. Matty, as Golding himself said, “was the character who binds
together so many of his concerns: sanctity, the uncanny, and the numinous.
They are found elsewhere in the LF, PM, Rites of Passage and the DT”
(qtd. in. Golding crisis).
The entire episode and characters of the first novel, the Lord of the
Flies, were placed in a nameless island and its first in-house reader, Miss
Perkins, dismissed it as an "absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the
explosion of an atom bomb on the Colonies. A group of children who land
in jungle country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless"(William
Golding crisis).Little did she know that apparently this rubbish and dull
story and the unnamed island is a literary panopticon that does not require
any name as distinct identity but that creates permanent visibility of the
human race as the novel deals with several diverse issues, some explicitly
and some in a implicit manner. We are taken as far back as the beginnings
of human civilization, a world where there are no laws, no rules and no god.
A group of children are dropped in an island. Then the story speaks
of an evolution of them in their individual capacity shedding light upon the
civilization and the relevance of laws and those who protect these laws.
Individual liberty is shown in conflict with individual morality and the laws
and its validity stands as a constant questioning overtone. The island, in a
way, represents the world at large we inhabit and we get to see ourselves
through it.
Rare and uncommon people always remain enigmatic and away from
the heat and dust of public life. Golding was difficult to understand in his
true perspective as all have explained him as a fabulist, myth maker, a
religious novelist, writer of dark fields etc. but seldom could any one delve
into his central point and real potential that he is a mystic and is content in
136 his deepest self, beyond any differentiation; hence a shrouded figure ever,
“But the Pythia must remain in public a shrouded figure” (DT86).It is also
in conformity with the central purpose of panoptic vision in which the
author creates visibility without being observed.
The editors of Faber, especially Charles Monteith and Golding were
in disagreement on the edition of the Lord of the Flies as the author, with his
spiritual power made the novel a reading for multiple levels and certainly,
for the highest level for the highest people with subtle sense of the world.
But, more often than not, people of Monteith’s sensibility which is certainly
erudite in rational world, but coarse for the spiritual realm would be fond of
a drama that caters to the need of the mundane people, not the subtle ones.
Ionides represents the mundane world of so called erudite people like
Monteith, the custodians of the society. The world of Ionides is best
explained by the author himself through the voice of Arieka:
I began to understand that he was passionately fond of dramatic
representation, an art which has its own language, not just that spoken
on the stage before an audience but spoken by actors when they are
by themselves or accompanied by the technicians of presentation. I
began to be concerned that in our dealing with the god or gods we
were using a form of speech more appropriate to the modern kind of
drama which, I am told, lacked dignity and religious feeling and had
interest only in the mundane affairs of men. I began to understand by
way of the language which Ionides used how the surroundings of the
oracle had altered (DT 96).
Thus, it is clear that it is not so easy to speak the language of god or gods
and neither it’s everybody’s take. Language is too subtle to be understood
by common people .This does not mean, however, that none should speak it,
at least the inspired ones, or else, how the world strides or think of striding
137 beyond the binary? He is inspired to speak the god’s truth the proof of
which lies in his series of fiction beginning from the LF and culminating at
the DT which explores the one truth against the back drop of all binary to its
dissolution to oneness, from apparent level of differentiation to integration
of whole cosmos, not just the universe. When in the second novel, the INH,
he spoke of annihilation of all innocence, and rise of crafty Homo sapiens;
he certainly lamented the so called myth of progress and that the mundane
world fails to understand the Gia theory of common origin of all species let
alone the oneness of the universe.
Certain situations as technical feature are created for the characters to
persuade them to look beyond the binary world .Pincher Martin’s Lone
condition as technical feature of the novel becomes essential for self
realization and self-actualization. Boys’ world was deserted on an island.
Lone condition enlarges our vision to see the limits of possibility and man is
forced to look beyond. Golding coined the term for James Lovelock's
concept of Gaia, and who believed the sea is the mother of all mankind, in
the sense that it's from the ocean that life first crawled ashore.
Another technical feature that contributes to his fiction's emphasis on
enlarging the vision is the subversion of literary models and the use of what
is called ‘the confrontation scene.’ Each fiction originates against another
writer's point of view on matters of society, history, morality or religion. For
example, Lord of the Flies ironically subverts Ballantyne's Coral Island
while Free Fall gives a sensual inversion of the spiritual values of Dante's
Vita Nouva. In a situation of such subversion and a sudden twist in the point
of view at the end of each fiction, the reader is forced through some
ambivalent deliberations while encountering his/her own psychic landscape
and thus, the scene, as in the case of Free Fall, brings about conflict of two
138 opposing ideologies, between two worlds which occurs in structural terms in
the fiction.
The panoptic vision can be gauzed as a bird’s eye view in his noble
lecture:
Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal
pessimist but a cosmic optimist. I should have thought that anyone
with an ear for language would understand that I was allowing more
connotation than denotation to the word 'cosmic' though in derivation
universal and cosmic mean the same thing. I meant, of course, that
when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of
rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and
identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god
Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension
which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore (Noble Lecture).
Prospero in the Tempest created a panopticon which can be compared
and contrasted with Golding’s vision. Gonzalez argues: “Prospero’s attitude
equals the role of the colonial ruler and the necromancer. Moreover, his
omnipotent, godlike control resembles that described by the French
philosopher Michel Foucault as one of the most nightmarish fantasies of
power ever designed by the human mind…-the metaphor of the
‘panopticon’; a prison where the jailer can see and hear every thing, but,
conversely, he can not be seen or perceived by the prisoners” (Gonzalez).
But the irony is that Prospero himself was a prisoner as if a prisoner
of his owns self as he was compelled to be in the island. Prospero’s
invisibility transformed to his chief sentinel, Ariel, who represents
panopticon symbolizing absolute control of power. Prospero’s panopticon
was created for a desire of seeing without being seen where as Golding’s
139 panopticon exposed every human being in this unnamed island, we call the
world .All the monstrous figure in island literature like Robinson Crusoe,
Frankenstein, and the Lord of the Flies have been subjected to a process of
educational metamorphosis by imperial or colonial power which provided
them with the values of political correctness but ultimately the same value
betrays their masters. The Naval Officer who comes to rescue the boys from
the island is a pun used by Golding showing the irony of rescue as he is
about to go for his mission of human slaughter in the ongoing world war II
and he represents the politically correct civilized society of Europe.
Caliban’s divided self reminds the double speak of Ionides in the
Double Tongue. He is colonized and feels ‘otherness’; otherwise he is a
natural man representing the renaissance origin. But he is fed with the
dream of civilisation and education by so called “scientist’s thirst for
forbidden knowledge” (Gonzalez).The world began to worship the science
as the post Darwinian God and the result is loss of innocence for the Homo
sapiens (INH), and for Ionides, ‘cynic, atheist, contriver, liar, believed in
god!’(DT136).
William Golding creates a mighty religious dimension in his
perception of the world which he expresses through certain prominent
protagonists beginning from Simon (LF) and ending with Arieka (DT). He
works with the myth of a Fall. The Inheritors shows an original state of
innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the more rational
homo sapiens. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion
and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence. But
both the forces of good and evil spring from human heart and a visibility,
what he understood, was the need of the hour so that a constant watch could
keep us corrected.
140 Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of English schoolboys
marooned on a tropical island after their plane is shot down during a war.
Though the novel is fictional, its exploration of the idea of human evil is at
least partly based on Golding’s experience with the real-life violence and
brutality of World War II. Free from the rules and structures of civilization
and society, the boys on the island in Lord of the Flies descend into
savagery. As the boys split into factions, some behave peacefully and work
together to maintain order and achieve common goals, while others rebel
and seek only anarchy and violence. In his portrayal of the small world of
the island, Golding paints, “A broader visibility of the fundamental human
struggle between the civilizing instinct-the impulse to obey rules, behave
morally, and act lawfully-and the savage instinct-the impulse to seek brute
power over others, act selfishly, scorn moral rules, and indulge in
violence.”(Cox 116).
The Lord of the Flies in the post-war years dramatizes the nature of
world and its functioning through a pack of British boys from a Cathedral
Choir-school on a desert island who, gradually falls away from the genteel
civilization that has so far shaped it and regress into dirt, barbarism, and
murder. Golding’s concern is to present us with a vision of human nature
and also the nature of the world which we inhabit through the experiences of
this school children, “letting them work out archetypal patterns of human
society”( Cox 116) .
The island itself is boat-shaped, and the children typify all mankind
on their journey through life. By isolating the boys on the island, Golding
probes the deep inner recesses of human representatives to show the
instincts and impulses of the adult world outside the island. At an extreme
situation man reverts to his natural behavior; all the basic instincts like
hunger, passion, greed and fear assist themselves at the cost of his
rationality and morality. Faced by primeval conditions, the boys soon
141 discard their civic habits learnt from home and adults society. They turn
fierce and aggressive and more sinister elements take control over their
nature. In the absence of any check system by the adult world, they
themselves grow into a microcosm of the adult world displaying their
instinctual evil and guilt.
In the opening scenes, the boys are on an Edenic island with the green
shadows, palm and coconut saplings, lagoon, little breezes and plenty of
food and water. Ralph and Piggy are in rapture with the glamour of this
new found paradise. The paradise, for Ralph, ‘was the imagined but never
fully realized place leaping into real life’ (LF: 21). As the events unfold, we
see that fruit-eating commune on the Eden–island subverts into totalitarian
butchery. Both order and disorder are in constant conflict throughout the
novel. The conch symbolizes the notion of order which heralds formal
meetings. ‘We can use this to call the others. Have a meeting’ (LF: 22).
Thus “the conch becomes identified with its procedure, with democracy and
the right to free speech” (weeks: 18).
The symbol of conch not only helps in social purpose but also traces
the trajectory of plot and establishes character. Piggy is a kind of ‘father
figure’ (Oldsey: 178) as against simply a fat boy for, he counsels common
sense and has regards for order and authority. His point of view stands like
rational humanism. It is he who is first excited by the conch, gives the idea
of the meeting and makes suggestions for establishing a civilized society.
The ‘littluns’ are terrified by the night time vision of a ‘snake-thing’ or
‘beastie’. Now children’s own irresponsibility and ignorance turn the Eden
into a place of terror, “liberate a power that is more and more savage… and
that power appeals to something ’savage’ in the boys themselves”
(Weeks:165)
142 Ralph, who at the first instance has brought the scattered groups
together, is now makes a desperate attempt to build the shelter with an
urgency of ‘home’; his instincts are to ward off terror by the social security.
On the other hand, Jack finds a renewed spirit of hunting, a kind of instincts
that lie hidden in everyman. For him the forest is not only a place to hunt
but also a place where one feels hunted. He reverts to a state of savagery
and hence his passion for hunting overrides the idea of rescue as he utters,
“rescue? Yes, of course! All the same, I’d like to catch a pig first”. (LF: 67).
They look at each other, baffled, in love and hate and share “two continents
of experience, and feeling, unable to communicate” (LF: 70).
Ralph’s
‘treasure island’ begins to break up into blood shed. S.J. Boyd views that,
“the boys regress to what might be called a state of nature, but the
experience of this is not of any earthly paradise but a hell on earth” (Monod:
138).
Why the things break up is what Golding has made us see in the
actions of three main characters, their motives and all these are held in the
programme of the book for readers to unfold and explain. The world of
Ralph and Jack are mutually opposed in their attitude and vision of life.
Ralph lives in a world of “Longing and baffled common sense whereas,
Jack’s is “the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill…”
(LF: 89). The physical condition of the boys also degenerated in absence of
balanced diet and lack of toilet facilities. The ‘littluns’ suffer from
“stomach- aches and a sort of diarrhoea” (LF: 74) and look “filthily dirty”
(LF: 75). The ‘littluns’ are now overwhelmed by horror and brutality. In
their howl, “they were reminded of their personal sorrow; …sorrow that was
universal”. (LF: 108).
What is traced here is the degeneration not only in the boys but also,
“on a deeper level, in the constitution of man’s psyche, in ‘mankind’s
143 essential illnesses” (Johnston: 51). Vergenia Tiger observes that: “There is
no essential difference between the island world and the adult one and it is
the burden of the fable’s structure… to make it clear that the children’s
experiment on the island has its constant counterpart in the world outside”
(51). Therefore, the novel is suggestive of large scale human values which
are universal.
Golding himself, having survived the world war–II as a naval officer,
is quite understandably concerned with the nature of man in the world
outside and the root of the disease man suffers from. It is the Great War that
has led the crash-landing at the desert island. The dead parachutist, the
symbol of decay and disorder of the atomic holocaust from the adult world
intensifies their evil when “the world, that understandable and lawful world,
was slipping away” (LF: 113). Finally, the naval officer arrived at the island
at the close of the novel as an adult representative to put a check on the
present Savagery and to take them back to the adult world.
Thus, the dramatic episodes of the boys’ world can be viewed as
microcosm of the adult world, which is destroying itself. The boys will be
back again to a world ravaged by war, the terrible symbol of evil. So the
boys are not in fact rescued but are on a journey towards the fulfillment of
Simon’s prophecy: “You‘ll get back to where you came from (LF: 137).
This is perennial theme of Golding’s novel which he presents in
juvenile terms in a deliberate setting of RM Ballantyne’s Coral Island. His
intertextuality is both to present the ‘reality’ as well as to challenge the
smug religious and racial superiority. In a long pedigree of island literature
from Cruso to Coral Island we find a tendency to present human nature at
an extreme: “In More’s utopian fantasy and in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Island’,
we see human nature and society at their best” (Boyd: 5). Golding re-
144 evaluates these earlier texts to dehypnotize our sense of reality in the face of
the horrors of Belsen and Dresden.
Ballantyne’s book is optimistic in an imperialist, Victorian manner
for evil in his book lies firmly outside the English school boys and made
manifest by savage, black cannibals. When Jack says: “After all we’re not
savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything”, or the
British officer at the end remarks, “I should have thought that a pack of
British boys …would have been able to put up a better show” (LF. P. 248),
Golding scraps the label off and parodies Ballantyne’s. The false optimistic
portraits, which equate English with good and foreign with evil, are
overturned to suggest that evil lies everywhere and it resides within
humanity. External evil is a projection of an inner evil. Thus Golding
offers a “critique of Victorian Imperialism” (Weeks: 4) which Chinua
Achebe echoes in his criticism of the heart of Darkness, “…beneath their
veneer of civilization, the Europeans are, the novel tells us, as barbaric as
the Africans…the novel portrays Africans as a prehistoric mass of frenzied,
howling, incomprehensible barbarians..." (Tyson 374-375).
The theme of the Free Fall is made more significant by the two
worlds of the title. They possess, “both theological and scientific
connotations” (Monod: 135). The theological aspects predominate over the
scientific, which serves only as a metaphor. The central problems of the
narrator, Sammy, are those of free will, free choice and of the free fall - the
fall of man, the fall of everyman. Sammy repeatedly asks himself the same
questions: when did he lose or alienate his freedom, when did he fall from
childhood innocence? The protagonist’s name is also constituted of
dualities. ‘Samuel’ is the name of an Old Testament prophet, while
‘Mountjoy’ clearly possesses sexual connotations. This tension between the
religious and the carnal, the spirit and the flesh, provides the central
145 dynamic of Free Fall. The dual perspective is also clear in the phrase ‘free
fall’ suggesting that an object obeys the law of gravity and falls freely, but it
also suggests theological fall of humanity. The novel moves on two
interrelated quests: the quests “for the point where this monstrous world of
my present consciousness began…” (FF. P. 78) and another significant
quest of “the decision made freely that cost me my freedom” (FF: 7).
In other words, it is an exploration of his past in search of a pattern of
‘Becoming’ governed by choice. In the words of Weekes, “revelation and
recognition of Being, then, give way to exploration, explanation, discovery
of Becoming” (165). Golding as a myth maker explores the tension between
Being and Becoming and designs a form to explore the nature of looking for
truth. Sammy goes for a discovery what is already known. But the known
facts infect put on a new look as Sammy moves from adolescence to youth,
from innocence to guilt and finally stands confused finding no bridge.
The Free Fall is contrasted with Dante’s work deliberately for
creating a vision as Dante’s attitude seems to proclaim no devil, devoid of
any baseness and any sordid episode. The adolescent Sammy, who can
remember a time in childhood when the eye of innocence transformed a
squalid slum into a world of beauty and his “Eden” (FF: 20) now, fails to
realize the tragic cost of relinquishing innocence and its world after his
experience of sex. His world secularized: his love for Beatrice, or for
anyone else, is not ennobled or given meaning by the love of God but has
become a poor replacement for the religious sense he has lost. He needs
“therefore the tickling pleasure, the little death shared or self inflicted was
neither irrelevant nor sinful but the alter of whatever shoddy temple was left
to us.” (FF: 108). Virginia tiger comments: “whereas to Dante Beatrice
becomes an instrument of contemplation, exaltation, and finally salvation …
to Sammy she is merely an instrument of lust” (Boyd: 67). Beatrice is a coy
146 and religious girl who doesn’t respond to Sammy’s sexual frenzies. He
abuses her sexually as she fails to fulfill his lust. He desecrates the object of
his worships the way he has done by spitting on the alter and earns severe
self-desecration. His love is earthbound.
In Hot Gates, Golding argues that the basic nature of man is his
propensity to evil (87).He believes that the average man is sick and morally
diseased. He is disillusioned about the idea of perfectibility of social man
after the Great War. He further stresses that the real nature of man is ignored
and hidden by those who drapes man’s history as steady climb up the
evolutionary ladder towards ‘sweetness and light’. In theological terms, his
view of man’s imperfectability is familiar as the fall of man. Certainly this
view seems to be pessimistic as the novel enacts the theme but it is far from
being depressing novel. The narrative momentum on one hand takes the
readers to the inevitable catastrophe in the boys’ society and on the other
hand it awakens us all to the knowledge and deeper understanding of
mankind’s essential illness.
The author by depicting the original sin does not say,
“Something startlingly original but something which has to be restated by
each generation in its own terms” (Fleck: 190). In Golding’s world, the
Christian version of man’s depravity and limitations still convey a great deal
that is relevant and permanent. They do not convey everything as a solution,
rather, it is an awareness that can sustain the civilization; it is to:
“acknowledge the presence of this darkness in one’s own heart- a necessary
but devastating condition of growing up, of becoming fully and yet flawedly
human”(Boyd:1). It is for this reason that he is an allegorical writer.
The novel is a deliberate translation of a proposition into the
dramatic art and “this thesis leaves no doubt that the novel is a fable” (Peter:
37).The fiction sound at times as fables but the author worked out carefully
147 and has expressed disquiet at the term ‘fable’, for a fable speaks of some
kind of moral appendage and it is not an inherent structure of the book. He
wants to substitute the word ‘myth’ for ‘fable’ and says: I do feel fable as
being an invented thing on the surface whereas myth
comes out from the roots of things in the ancient
existence, the whole meaning of life, and
is something which
sense of being the key to
experience as a whole
(Kirszner:882).A close examination of the novel supports this view as it
moves the reader into recognition of nature of existence and individual
location in terms of the micro and macrocosmic world.
The genesis of myth is generally obscure. Myth generally contains
truths that link people together. It also attempts to explain phenomena that
human beings care about regardless of when and where they live. The Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1983 was awarded to William Golding "for his novels
which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and
universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today”
(Noble Prize).
Golding’s island world, the archetypal images cut across cultural and
racial boundaries and touch us on a deeper level for our understanding of the
world. Golding is out of step with that of his contemporary writers to move
beyond the parochial world and to present the works of universal
applicability or “myths of total explanation” (Fleck: 53). He realizes that the
present world is altered by new knowledge. The pattern of human behavior
is markedly cynical. The myth of progress has failed; but the rival myth of
necessary evil and universal guilt has come back without bringing God with
it. Hence, in Golding’s book one cannot expect any highbrow modern
writing canvassing false superiority. The dilemma of modern man and
modern crisis has rotted in his mind and thus new myth has put down roots.
148 What Golding has called ‘the terrible disease of being human’ in The
Hot Gates is the terrible ignorance. Vivekananda in his discourse of
Vedanta has clearly stated that, “we have no theory of evil. We call it
ignorance” (Vedanta: 61).If we go by the law of nature, we see man is a tiny
boat in a tempest, rises one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and the
next moment dashes down into a yawning chasm, thus rolling to and fro as a
helpless wreck at the mercy of good and bad actions. Hence, self–
knowledge is paramount importance to guard against evil.
Golding is a man in search of cosmological truth. For him it is
the ultimate reality that counts irrespective of any labels or artificial pattern.
The whole moral frame work of his novels is conceived in terms of
traditional Christian symbolism. As mankind is subject to both good and
bad, good is equally a part of the whole process of our action, an inclusive
human concept. Golding has shown the human evil more prominently what
sometimes looks pessimistic for he believes: “Good can look after itself.
Evil is the problem” (Green: 79).
The dead parachutist in the Lord of the Flies is the result of man’s guilt
in his developing consciousness. Golding has shown in the inheritors that
the gift of progressivism of evolutionary science is guilt. The scientific and
intellectual superiority of the Home sapiens over his simian victims is
precisely measured by the guilt which dominates life and are relatively
absent from his predecessor’s. The parachutist is one among the innocent
tribes of the pre – historic man who is exterminated and stands as a sad
symbol of scientific progress. But the reality is a regression from Christian
values to the law of jungle, to the ruthless and greedy thrusts for domination
and exploitation.
Golding’s real power has been his mythopoeic obsession to lay bare the
Original Sin–the evil of pride, greed, cruelty etc. in the best of human
149 actions. We do not require a doctrine to remind us of man’s cruelty and
barbarism; what we require is a doctrine that questions such evil and
redeems our prime innocence and goodness. Golding shakes us through our
bones through his mythological enactments to look at the ways how human
commits evil. His doctrine of original sin may be disputable, but what can
not be denied is the depth and seriousness of his purpose of reawakening us
to our self - knowledge of good and evil, of right purpose for a new
beginning.
When one of piggy’s glasses is broken; it bears a metaphorical meaning
that his appeal to man’s rationality, and his acceptance of science as
providing an ultimate answer have one vision blinded. Fleck compares his
attitude that everything is susceptible to reason with the mindset “that was
popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before it was
shattered by two world wars” (196).James Frazer also herds its optimistic
view on the triumphs of science that, “the future is bound up with the
fortunes of sciences, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific
discovery is a wrong to humanity”( 132).But we see the science has brought
an atomic war as it is controlled by a corrupt mankind and the boys are
isolated in the island. Golding is never against the science as he admires
Copernicus for his inclination towards mysticism. He attempts to uncover
the darkness of man’s reason and faith as he makes it clear in Darkness
Visible that “darkness is man–shaped” and reconciliation is possible which
is an idea of unity hence, piggy with his one lens broken, which is dried
reason, fails to bring back order and keep himself alive. His tragic death
shows the inadequacy of the rational mind as a total human response to life.
Despite the warning of the Lord of the Flies about what will
happen to him, he bears his pathetic death. Simon’s life and death are an
imitation of Christ on whom the boys re–enact the crucifixion of Jesus
150 Christ. He is considered by critics as scapegoat against what Golding
replied, “a saint is not just a scapegoat … a saint is someone who
voluntarily embraces his fate … Simon is somebody who exists not for
himself, but only as a part of a pattern”. (Bergonzi: 180-181) .Simon allowed
himself to be killed only to save mankind from its guilt. His life and death
do not convert the boys world to instant goodness but he is at least one good
character who rises above ignorance to illuminating knowledge, brings back
hope among the boys in the pervasive gloom of the island and shows in
Christian terms that there is possibility of redemption for mankind.
His novel is absolutely optimistic and moves always through
the tension between optimism and pessimism, between hope and despair and
fills our heart with essentially goodness and redemption as well. Ralph, ‘the
fair boy’, whose eye proclaim ‘no devil’ is essentially a good boy. His
efforts to organize the scattered group, civic values and to keep a flame of
fire going for rescue are his constant endeavor to be sincere and honest. We
loathe the blood lust and evil of Jack and his hunters but they too are not out
and out villains. We are aware that at the outset Jack finds a piglet caught in
a curtain of creepers, draws his knife with a flourish but eschews: “because
of the enormity of the knife descending and
cutting into living flesh;
because of the unbearable blood”. (LF: 41). What drives him to primitive
behavior is his, “irresponsibility and ignorance liberate or power that is
more and more savage … and that power appeals to something savage in the
boys themselves”(Weeks:40).
Further, when the hunters go wild, paint their faces and laugh
in a blood thirsty snarling’; Jack is “Liberated from shame and self
consciousness”. (LF: 80). His attempt to hide his shame and self
consciousness shows his innate goodness veiled under temporary eclipse
and can readily shine under the tree of knowledge. He, in fact, shines
151 through when in the presence of the British officer at the end, he cries and
sobs and, “he gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island;
great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body.”
(LF: 248). Ralph and piggy established the democratic system in the island
yet that gradually turns into an absolute monarchy. Interestingly the boys
prefer Jack’s tyranny more to Ralph’s tribe. Jack is fair enough in his effort
to provide meat for the boys; quells the quarreling boys and keep them
active and in order. Hobbe’s political theory of human fractiousness and a
need for a monarch to control exactly corresponds to the boys’ situation.
Golding here makes us see that man’s attraction and prosperity to evil make
greater leap than it is towards good. On the contrary we try to desist from
goodness and even with all our might we try to annihilate the good.
Secular world of Sammy, where the only certain good is mask or
salt- sex, there is a world with moral certainties, that there is sin and that one
must face its terrible consequences. One consequence of his sin is reduction
of Beatrice to animal level. Sammy is guilty of treating Beatrice as
something less than human being. He not only abuses her physically but
also tortures her by catechism to elicit some intellectual response. It is
painful to see how the innocent is tortured even though she is sincere and
devoted. After she is abandoned, she writes a painful letter asking Sammy’s
forgiveness with a touch of her concern for him. She writes, “We are out of
danger” (FF: 130) with a cross at the left hand of the letter. It might be a
symbolic language that she has not conceived or it might be she is crucified.
Like the Christ she does not blame anybody, only bears the brunt. Boyed
observes that, “Beatrice the rather dim, religious girl is the novel’s holy
fool, the innocent who is crucified for Sammy’s sin” (72). She offers her
fool’s wisdom, her key word ‘may be’. Sammy recognizes this little
wisdom: ‘for may be was sign of all our times. We are certain of
152 nothing.”(FF: 121). But Sammy fails to internalize that grand word of a
growing uncertainty.
Again, Sammy suffers in P.O.W. Camp being horribly interrogated
by the Gestapo. He realizes that his role with Beatrice is reversed in the
prison cell. The boy who was tortured by Miss Pringle and learned to loathe
himself, who tortured and threaten to kill Beatrice, is now tortured by
professional psychologist. It is a grim vision of a world in which self–
loathing, guilt and evil forces become the order of the day. Arnold Johnston
comments that, “Sammy must wait until his imprisonment by Halde to
realize that his true labyrinth, like Pagan Daedalus’s is self created and like
Dante’s inferno, exists within himself”(Johnston:61).
Finally, the panoptic vision the author left behind is a constant watchdog that is reminding the humanity at large of its nature being and directing
toward ever perfecting height:
Evidently age need not wither us nor custom stale our infinite variety.
Let us be, for a while, not serious but considerate. I myself face
another danger. I do not speak in a small tribal language as it might
be one of the six hundred languages of Nigeria. Of course the value of
any language is incalculable. Your Laureate of 1979, the Greek poet
Elytis, made quite clear that the relative value of works of literature is
not to be decided by counting heads. It is, I think, the greatest tribute
one can pay to your committees that they have consistently sought for
value in a work without heeding how many people can or cannot read
it. The young John Keats spoke of Greek poets who "died content on
pleasant sward, leaving great verse unto a little clan". Indeed and
indeed, small can be beautiful. To quote yet another poet - prose
writer … Ben Jonson said:
153 "It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald and sere(Noble lecture).
Golding’s setting
in Pincher Martin is not remote or exotic and it
has a social dimension. Golding in an interview states that, “this time I want
to show the patternlessness of life before we impose our pattern on it”
(Green: 92). Naturally, the author is confronted with the creative impasse of
either to come to terms with humanity, or to ignore it. However, the novel
explores the two counter posed worlds of human awareness–the physical
universe and the metaphysical, the world of science and God. The novel has
much in common with its predecessor, particularly with Pincher Martin, but
it is also different from earlier three novels
Golding’s panoptic vision is to show the universality of the human
condition through the series of his fiction. Golding’s concern is to present us
with a vision of human nature and also the nature of the world which we
inhabit through the experiences of this school children, “letting them work
out archetypal patterns of human society” (Cox: 116). In case of the
Inheritors the author has used a historical setting to draw parallels to the
present time. The theme is shown as the, “line of darkness which is modern
man’s inheritance; our ability to perpetuate horrors upon our fellow man and
mistreat the world we live in seen as the price of evolutionary
progress”(Thehwa).
Apparently his fiction are dystopian as there is no idyll for respite and
day dreaming in a utopia. The dream of a perfectly harmonious world may
be a beautiful but will quickly turn into, what the author understood a
nightmare. Scientific progress and its concomitant Enlightment have
brought rationality and reasonability on western mind. The emphasis on
154 logic and reason is one of the golden threads running through Western
world from the time of Plato to the modern period. Reason is the main cause
of western scientific progress and the Greeks, especially Plato, Aristotle etc,
handed down a systematic philosophy for maintaining balance of the
science and humanities. The Enlightenment heightened the belief and
dependence in reason as a universal human quality so much that we have
witnessed two great wars. Ibn Warraq argues that the “golden threads” of
Western culture can have negative side effects: “It could be argued that the
three defining characteristics of the West – rationalism, universalism (with
its underlying or implied liberalism), and self-criticism – can lead to their
opposites,
or
to
other
undesirable
consequences”(qtd.in
Cult
of
reason).Hence, Golding creates a parable about the cost of evolutionary
progress through The Inheritors which has shown the encounter that took
place 2700 years ago between the Neanderthals and a group of Homo
sapiens and the result is that innocence is gone for good.
When the Neanderthal family reaches their peaceful place at summer
grounds after an arduous journey, they discover the new people. Their
language is ethereal like signals so strong that only the innocents could
grasp it. But the crafty Homo sapiens were lying in wait to kill the adults
and snatch the babies. The nonviolent clan looks upon the new people with
great love and affection the way they themselves are connected with each
other. Ultimately, the damage is done by the sticks against them taking
away the small baby, Liku.
The fiction is multilayered and echoes the Lord of the Flies letting us
see a universal mythic sensibility. Annis in his review commented, “The
new humans have eaten the apple of knowledge; they have become selfaware, separate. Cast outside the circle of oneness that connects other living
things; they fear the very world they live in and destroy all around them as
155 they attempt to control it. We are the inheritors. Our inheritance, stained by
the dark sin of Cain and bought by our brothers' blood, is the Earth”. Lok is
a point of view protagonist through whose eye the story unfolds. When the
Homo sapiens celebrate their kill and bewildered Lok struggles to
comprehend these predators; they “are like a famished wolf in the hollow of
a tree” (INH: 83).
Golding’s panopticon reflects skillfully the play of the binaries of
good and evil, and the nature of man starting from the Lord of the Flies to
successive ventures. Ralph, who represents innocence, is manipulated by the
other boys like jack who represent society and the descendants of the Homo
sapiens. Here, we pay the price of our progress of evolution and not the
meek, but the rational, scientific man inherits the earth.
The rescue of the boys (LF) is ultimately a ‘gimmick’, a trick, and a
means of cutting down or softening the implications built up within the
structure of the boys’ society on the island”. Golding very skillfully brings
this rescue operation as a pun on the ignorant world as Golding said, “The
officer having interrupted a manhunt, prepares to take the children off the
island in a cruise which will presently be hunting its enemy in the same
implacable way. And who will rescue the adult and his cruiser” (Baker: 63)?
The rescuer here is a man of war, the same breed of the Homo sapiens of
The Inheritors and Jack’s tribe (LF) who is enmeshed in the same evil.
Golding implies that the long course of evolution has brought no
fundamental change in human nature. We are today essentially what we
were in the past. The innocent Neanderthals perished and the Homo sapiens,
a dubious and evil people survived. Darkness is the root of our being.
Golding humorously, yet poignantly uttered the same symbol during his
noble lecture: “your first view of me, white bearded and ancient, may have
turned that gloom into profound dark; dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of
156 noon, irrecoverably dark, total eclipse. But the case is not as hard as that”
(Noble lecture).
The matter of rescue further points as to what extent human being
could be rescued. The island is a microcosm of the paradise for the boys’
world. The same is put on fire for killing Ralph and eventually the
perpetrators also would be destroyed in the all encompassing fire what they
never realised. Then, who rescues who is a pertinent question. The Naval
officer’s remarks on first seeing the condition of the pack of British boys on
the island is worth noting as he said that the British boys should have
behaved properly. But the boys regressed to barbarism as the hold of the
coir school lost meaning against the burgeoning evil force and its
concomitant power in most of them. Unlike the rules of God in the Garden
of Eden, the island paradise was ruled by Beelzebub, the Satan. Internal evil
is in sharp contrast with the external fear on the island. They keep haunting
for the unknown beast. Jack and his followers paint their faces to liberate
themselves from shame and self-consciousness .Finally, Jack the autocratic
leader of the new tribe of hunters organise a violent ritual slaughter of a sow
and places it on a sharpened stake as an offering to the unknown beast
which becomes the icon of their totem or the Beast-God: “This head is for
the beast. It’s a gift” (LF: 169).
Naturally, the Theurgy of propitiating such demoniac god would
bring blood-lust ruining the paradise for ever. Jack tries to appease the beast
with the pig’s flesh as he says, the symbol of this propitiation is the stick
sharpened at both ends, the support of the totem, Lord of the Flies. It is a
weapon that suggests that the user can kill and be killed. It is also a symbol
which reminds us of the self defeating nature of atomic war in the opening
chapter. While the children impatiently yearn for rescue, a sign from the
adult world appears on the mountain top. It is a symbol which persists
157 throughout the novel. The symbol is the dead parachutist, himself a victim
of the war which when distends by air shows how the adult fury increases as
enacted by the boys on the island. ‘The beast’ turns out to have a human
face; “the specter on the mountain that so haunts them is a literal instance of
human corruption” (Henderson: 374) .The dead airman, the victim and
perpetrator of military aggression gives the children the chance to
externalize their apprehension of evil. It is his baleful, rotting presence
which diverts them to ignore Simon’s pregnant perception: “What I mean
is… may be it’s only us”. (LF: 111).
Simon becomes inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s
essential illness. Weeks observes here that, “the ‘majesty of adult life’ is a
childish delusion… morality can be and has been inadequate to prevent
wholesale destruction and savagery” (Weeks: 57). Simon, the Christ figure,
worshiped the divine god who could only know the secrets of life that the
beast is not external, it is internal and the warning by the beast that he would
devour him one day came sooner just the way the clergy was pushed to
death by Talbot in RP. Hence, Golding shows that life itself is the source of
evil force and there is no rescue as there is no bridge. Like the unnamed
island in LF or Talbot’s voyage in vague space and time, we all are His
children for perfecting ourselves till we attain our lost paradise through self
knowledge.
Golding is obsessed with the moral atrophy of the modern world.
Basically his novels proclaim that man is a fallen being. He makes valid
generalization about the whole meaning of life by showing what is constant
in man’s nature. The egocentric version reality in Pincher’s mind is
arguably connected with the nature of Prometheus, the mythic hero who is
the God- deifier, and whose own life–worshiping identity gives meaning to
his suffering. Golding establishes Pincher’s Promethean heroism as one
158 more case of man’s self–creating egoism. Jocelin destroys precious human
lives and builds the spire out of his ego. Nevertheless, the faith what he had
possessed at the outset of the novel also has its own meaningful place. The
Spire ultimately stands both in blood and beauty, good and evil declaring
the transcendent nature of good and evil. If Ralph in the Lord of the Flies is
a projection of man’s good impulses from which we derive the authority
figures, who establish the necessity for our valid moral action, then Jack
becomes an externalization of evil forces. It is Simon, the Christ figure, who
alone among the boys feels the real nature of evil on the island, that it is not
external but part of their very selves. But his recognition of evil and all
mankind complicity occasions his own demise.
Golding’s world is a perfect microcosm of the macrocosm. Man in
his microcosmic world seeks a pattern and order and face a natural chaos of
existence in his struggle with the world and with the being. The chaos
manifests itself in various forms of moral evil resulting from irrational
scientific progressivism. In the evolutionary process man has progressed in
one sense, and on the other sense, he has lost his prime innocence. Golding
depicts man’s loss of innocence, his sense of unity with the fragmentation of
his undifferentiated consciousness. Man’s rise to consciousness is man’s
fall. The fall, for Golding, is a reality occurring not only for human species
but also artificial pattern of social order (LF) or in the case of an individual
as he moves from innocence to experience (FF). He opposes the
sociological view of societal defects for evil and traces it into the individual
human being.
Despite the warning of the Lord of the Flies about what will
happen to him, he bears his pathetic death. Simon’s life and death are an
imitation of Christ on whom the boys re–enact the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ. He is considered by critics as scapegoat against what Golding
159 replied, “a saint is not just a scapegoat … a saint is someone who
voluntarily embraces his fate … Simon is somebody who exists not for
himself, but only as a part of a pattern” (Bergonzi: 81).
Simon allowed himself to be killed only to save mankind from
its guilt. His life and death do not convert the boys world to instant
goodness but he is at least one good character who rises above ignorance to
illuminating knowledge, brings back hope among the boys in the pervasive
gloom of the island and shows in Christian terms that there is possibility of
redemption for mankind. Vivekananda has clearly stated that, “we have no
theory of evil. We call it ignorance.” (Vedanta: 61).Simon and Arieka have
to bleed as they are corrupted by their mortality, but that blood is of
purification, not of violence. The further illumination is given here the most
vividly, “Perhaps part of an utterance was always stained by the blood of the
Pythia, unavoidably corrupted by her mortality so that immortal god could
only use her in her measure as a flute can only be used in its compass. It
might, I thought be that” (DT 89).
The conflict of Rome and Greek as shown in the Double Tongue is
based upon the binary concept of two powers; the former is described as
more apt in warfare and hence, mundane and the later is termed as the
source of all knowledge and spirituality. The High priest in this regard gives
his opinion, “I can tell you what I think. An opinion. But I have no
proof…You see they (Roman) are not religious as we are, they are simply
superstitious” (DT 105). Again, the conflict can be termed as the general
political ill will among the nations across the world that create power blocks
and culminating in ceaseless warfare, the germ of which is sowed in every
human being as shown in the LF at the first instance and subsequently in the
Inheritors. It’s a natural fear originating from within that we tend to undo it
by finding its external cause and resort to barbarism:
160 because if you don’t push your neighbor a bit further away who
knows what he might do?...You have to be top man over your new
neighbors who were once your neighbor’s neighbor and so on …You
end by pushing your fear all the way to the Red Sea in one direction
and to Farthest Thule in the other!(DT105).
Then, where is the way out of such action? The author believes in the theory
of karma and clearly affirms, “They all have the lot before they’ve finished”
(DT105).Even the character of the High Priest, Ionides, is criticized, “High
priest you sound-I shouldn’t say –but you sound superstitious! ‘Fear makes
the heaven go round!’ (DT106). So, every one will have to face his/her
action.
For Sammy, “in childhood the two worlds interlock” (Kermode: 64).
These inter locked worlds are as important to shape Sammy’s life as the
slum and its living conditions in Rotten Row. Sammy moves between them
without realizing their incompatibility. In all Golding’s novel there is an
explicit treatment of debate between a rational or scientific view of the
world and a more intuitive and generally religious attitude, an opposition
which has been treated of in many great works of English literature since the
days of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. The tension between the two is
often embodied in two distinct characters: Simon and Piggy (LF), Roger and
Jocelin ( SP), Bell and Sim (DV) and Talbot and Colley (RP). We are
confronted with the debate of Martin’s death in PM at the end of the book.
Campbell wonders about how Martin can survive once he is dead. He
believes that the drowned man cannot suffer as he could not even kick off
his sea boots. It is an earth–bound answer to the death as it is about the love
of Sammy to Beatrice. Davidson understands the drift and believes in
spiritual survival. S.J. Boyd comments that the novel can be read in two
ways: “as a disappearance into the great purple dark of nonentity or as an
161 entry into a spiritual realm that is three times real.” (Boyd: 76).Both the
views, notwithstanding the empirical criticism on it, seem possible and
defensible.
An assessment of the Free Fall purely on religious sense is to impose
a pattern on the essential mystery of things, of Sammy’s life. It is already
observed that social factors are greatly responsible for Sammy’s fall. His
science teacher views his sin not as a damning mortal sin freely entered into
but regards it as an understandable human error by an immature young man.
In a Godless world of atoms and forces we have not yet understood the
mystery of the universe. We all have free will yet nowhere have we found
God wants us to fall. Sammy defiles religion, despises and rejects; Beatrice
may represent purity and honour, but Pringle’s uncharitable religious
teaching has a great deal to incline Sammy towards his ruin. At the point of
Sammy’s falls, we see the gravity of his self-condemnation. He confesses,
“For this guilt, I found occasion to invent a crime that fitted the punishment.
Guilty am I therefore wicked I will be …” (FF232). Weeks comments here:
“guilt comes before the crime and can cause it” (67).
Golding wants the reader to locate and understand the sources of the
evil force in the pattern less world. He employs a situation that is a remote
in time, characters are radically different yet representative and a narrative
tone that is analytical and judicial. The forms that Golding uses carry
implementation both for the kind of action selected and for the kind of
character involved in it. Consequently the judgment of other character who
are exemplary, but not merely typical, is necessary. The boy who was
tortured by Miss Pringle and learned to loathe himself, who tortured and
threaten to kill Beatrice, is now tortured by professional psychologist. It is a
grim vision of a world in which self–loathing, guilt and evil forces become
the order of the day. Johnston comments that, “Sammy must wait until his
162 imprisonment by Halde to realise that his true labyrinth, like Pagan
Daedalus’s is self created and like Dante’s inferno, exists within himself”
(61).
The object of Sammy’s horrified imagination; the shape at the heart
of his being is made clear by Dr. Halde who otherwise stands as good out of
his profession. He is, in the average perception, rouge or a Satan who
inflicts mental injuries. But he is also a doctor; he does seem to effect a
partial cure of Sammy, who emerged out of prison camp to find a world
transformed from sordidness and ugliness to the most radiant beauty. He
gains an insight into “the nature of new world outside and… the nature of
dead thing inside” (FF189). Now, the protagonist’s confession can be seen
in the perspective with the apocalyptic language with what the book began.
About his new vision, Subba Rao comments “Paradoxically enough, the
physical darkness lead him to light, but the light shows up the darkness
within” (123). Sammy gains the wordsworthian vision of celestial glory and
a poignant awareness of natural depravity. “The world shines with the
innocent light of their own created nature” (FF 186). He is “visited by a
flake of fire, miraculous and Pentecostal… transmuted… once and forever”
(FF188). As with Moses, the veil has been lifted from Sammy’s eye, “The
most loath some and abject creatures, continuously created”, he discovers
now “inhabiting the center of my own awareness” (FF190). Now Mountjoy
turn into biblical Samuel and perceives the qualities of king ship.
Paradoxically, he finds these qualities in all men and is able to see the
connection between the Kings of Egypt and humanity at large. He become
conscious of the responsibilities of kingship and his choice for king is all
men, a prophecy burdensome, but indisputably valid.
Sammy’s experiences of Halde’s torture would seem to be a form of
purgatory, a state which Dante imagines as a great mountain up which souls
163 strive toward bliss, a mountain of pain misery and joy. When he cries out in
terror: “Help me! Help me!” (FF184); it is a total surrender of the self to the
other. He leaves behind his ego– “I was dead away myself”, and he emerges
from the cell, “a man resurrected” (FF186). This pattern of symbolic death
and rebirth, this decent into and emergence from darkness, is found
elsewhere in Golding’s fiction: Simon’s confrontation with the embodiment
of evil in the Lord of the Files culminates into his prophetic fit and death;
Matty, the holy fool of Darkness Visible, organises for himself an
extraordinary trial in the desert to emerge prophetic perception. These
pathetic and tragic states seem to enhance the insight, the vision and
prophetic powers of those who undergo their agonies. Kermode observes
that, “The novel is about delivery from the body of this death; not only
about the fall but also about regeneration”(65) .Sammy, who seems in other
way no prophets, emerges with an intense religious apprehension of the
world, a prophetic vision of his own filthiness and evil .
The self–knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil in a spiritually
barren world is the only hope for humanity and the movement from
ignorance to revelation is a continual process in Golding’s novels. Jocelin
also moves from ignorance to knowledge as it is in Golding’s earlier
fictions: Ralph weeps in recognition of human evil (LF); Lok realises that
Liku has been eaten (INH), Martin’s epic fight for life disintegrates in the
face of the black lightning and he learns that he is dead (PM).
In fact Jocelin and Martin share much in common as both the
characters are concerned with a central act of construction yet, they differ
sharply at the point of revelation. Martin negates selfless act of dying and in
his self–creating egoism he is lost into ‘absolute nothingness’. Jocelin, on
the other hand, gains the vision of the spire as a unity that moves the eyes
into focus. He is reborn, experiencing a Blake-ian vision of an apple tree as
164 ‘a cloud of angels flashing in the sunlight’ (SP 204). The joyous beauty
indeed grows out of the darkness. His mental vision sees for the first time
the completed spire as a thing in itself, whole and one with its all heights
and depths: It was the window, bright and open. Something divided it … It
was slim as a girl, translucent. It had grown from some seed of rose
coloured substance that glittered like a waterfall, an upwards waterfall. The
substance was one thing that broke all the way to infinity in cascades of
exultation that nothing could trammel (SP 223).
The tree of spire being many branched image of our life, it demands
to be likened as the Life–Tree or World Tree. The sameness of eternal
human experience is evoked in the world of the spire in a sense that despite
all the many coloured changes in manners and beliefs, we remain the same
creatures struggling between the forces of good and evil, between earth and
heaven. The cathedral as the microcosm of the universal order stands on
human pillars, the substance of which is “a kind of vital morality” (FF189).
In this substance reason and faith, good and evil are necessary ingredients
and are in constant war threatening at times the order to fall yet, the order
stands as ‘crooked beauty’. The beauty is flawed by the imperfection of
human enterprise but it can not fall. The order is eternal and an embodiment
of goodness that stands beyond time for ‘an upward waterfall’ is an
impossibility or mystic in its conception.
The tree of the spire is a holy book that contains both the lessons of
good and evil, fall and redemption and if the book is followed in right
earnest it can provide the keys to their clear interpretation and also form a
ladder to heaven. The seeker of truth and goodness is also likely to be
distracted or lost as the tree of the spire is many branched while holding its
head towards heaven. Truth and goodness seem highly complex and
confusing. Truth is pure, all–knowledge and invigorates a man to seek
165 higher goals. Truth and goodness can not be reduced to following a strict
code of rules or else Father Adam and Anselm with their strict adherence to
rules and scriptures would have been better characters than Jocelin. It is
Jocelin who glimpses “the universal Adam in his pride of hell” (Weeks:
232).
Man has grown away from reality by the spiritual blindness under the
eclipse of false illusions of smug scientific superiority. Golding, the
visionary saint, turns on writing about English School boys, pre-historic
man, dead sailor or the freely falling Sammy only to focus on contemporary
human nature. When there is widespread indifference in the spiritual,
intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the time, Golding is slightly out of
steps with that of his fellow writers in the 50's who moves beyond the
parochial worlds of rationalism to visionary fables of universal applicability.
His fiction is preoccupied with religious ideas. He is a “spiritual
cosmologist” (Monod 134) who seeks the relationship of man to the
universe, and through the universe to God. The perennial themes recurring
in his novels are good and evil, innocence and guilt, blood and beauty and
all are mysteriously related as a dichotomy in a religious sense and the
dividing line of such
dichotomy ceases to exit against all encompassing
nature of the world in a larger sense, against the unity, for "what men
believe is a function of what they are; and what they are is in part what has
happened to them" (FF161).
The same theological revelation is reflected in the Double Tongue.
For Pythia, the moment of her birth was a kind of ‘reprimand’ when her
mother and nurse cried out in laughter which echoes exactly the Vedanta
philosophy as explained by Vivekananda “our birth and death are recomposition and decomposition in this timeless world” (1:67).William
Golding's The Spire is the celebration of a miracle. Jocelin was inspired by a
166 vision and enabled by his aunt's wealth constructed a four hundred feet spire
on faith, over ruling the science. The cathedral is God's blessing to man and
man's worship to God.
The novelist is preoccupied with what is permanent in man's nature
and looks for how man is rooted to his cosmic situation. It is a kind of
religious exploration embodying the primordial pattern of human
experience. The Double Tongue explores the same as while contemplating a
visit to Athens Ionides guessed that nobody knew how to receive a Pythia.
Contrary to common mind, Pythia and Delphi are not the same thing, but
Pythia answers it is, “theologically possible” (DT130). Golding too has
emphasized on the practice of detachment as a way to attain such
theological state. She narrates her visit to her father’s old house after a long
gap reflecting her detachment from the world, “I cannot say that visiting my
father’s old house was very affecting…I was glad to see, not having ever
connected that house with anything but little put-upon Arieka” (DT
132).Such is the simplistic view of her own home as she began to see herself
belonging to all being and a presence transcending the universe.
Prophesies can not be invented of one’s own, it must spring from an
inspired soul or it might delude the world. Ionides was a divided soul,
lacked any conviction, so are the condition of our scholars and critics. When
they criticize out of their own limits it might always be possible that what
they produced is either a falsity or a hyper reality. During the course of
travel Arieka observes, “One young man…accused Ionides of inventing the
prophecies himself. This brought a sudden and I really believe shocked,
silence. Ionides lied calmly” (DT134).
Stealing others hexameter and passing them as one’s own is a
blasphemy to Golding, for one has to pay the coins to have it; else, very
soon the hollowness exposes bringing shame. Lecturing on god at length is
167 simple but it does not hold good unless it is realized. Words carry its
potentiality from the invisible power; hence, the author wants the reader to
earn it to be of any use. When Ionides speaks of his oracular attainment:
“I have always passed on what I heard, and where I was uncertain of
what I heard I have said nothing. You know that the oracle has
sometimes returned to the ancient custom of speaking in hexameter
again. I am a channel only. I am no poet and could not invent these
verses myself. They come from a mouth that is pure and holy and the
god speaks through it” (DT136).
Certainly, Arieka or Golding can not bear such blatant lie on the earth
as it makes more harm than good. Arieka kept silent avoiding any
accusation against him of committing blasphemy as she understood that
creature like him is like a stone in the ocean in thousands of years, yet a
single drop of water does not penetrate into it for the make is such and it has
to be accepted. This make is otherwise called samaskara in Indian
philosophy which we carry from our previous births and in this world we act
accordingly. Life is a process that we undo our past action to correct
ourselves. Religious Arieka just thinks of such despicable liar as, “here was
the atheist speaking: and I knew him well enough to know that he was
speaking in all sincerity believed what he said, or I knew nothing about him.
So Ionides, cynic, atheist, contriver, liar, believer in god!”( DT 136).
All the characters and their settings are modern. The world from the
age of Vedanta or Homer down to the present time has remained the same
except the altered situations and changed external factors. We moderns
claim to be the most intelligent and rule the nature. Pincher martin
challenged the god’s providence until he was engulfed by the black
lightning. For jack and Ralph too the island was a resource for boundless
play of their whims and fancies, killing anything and everything they liked
168 and ransacking it to the highest possible limits. Golding created the magic
world for them for the highest fulfillment of sense- pleasure, but another
kind of magic poured into their ears through the omniscient voices in time to
time what they little cared for. He knew that people would fail to understand
the magic of his words, but again, it was his compulsion to do the needful to
the world as a god-send to perform the Theurgy for the mankind to
regenerate it from its so called modern slumber to the age old eternal truth
that never fades or adds on age what he left in magical word:
And we? We moderns? We had made a play of it, with scenery and a
cast, with triviality, so that it became much as its new surrounds were. All
that glitters was gold, except the words. I had spoken words and not known
I had spoken them. They were the god’s words (DT 97).
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London- Boston: Faber and Faber P, 1967, rep, 1985.print
BEYOND THE
BINARY
172 “Freedom breathes in the throb of the universe.
Unless there is unity at universal heart
we can not understand variety” (Vivekananda 1:338).
Structuralist criticism used the concept of binary opposition as pairs
of mutually exclusive signifiers in a paradigm set representing categories
which are logically opposed, but together they define a complete universe of
discourse,
e.g.
male/female,
colonizer/colonized,
good/evil,
worldly/spiritual etc. It holds that every thing could be studied as a
structure. Marx’s super structure and Freud’s unconscious as they put
forward, can explain societal phenomena and human mind. In studying
langue Saussure held that language is a structure with signs at its base and
signifier and signified issuing forth from it as binary oppositions. Thus,
human language and discourse as such can be understood as structured in
binary oppositions and functions as a hierarchy.
Binaries have been present in human thought from the earliest times
to mark differences and thus, gives shape to experience and the universe.
Binaries galore in Golding’s fiction as Baker and Ziegler have observed
that, “…basic dialectic”—the conflict between the rational and the irrational
elements in man’s nature—had been dramatised in all of Golding’s novels
(226),but Golding has gone beyond Marx ,Freud and Darwin, the crashing
bores of western thought and often his world of binary opposites slide into
one.
Golding novels are often regarded as quite difficult reading as they
present the nature of Golding’s vision of the world, which is a complex one,
in which a number of conflicting ideas or philosophies in binary opposition
exist in tension. The Spire is more concrete and elusive in so far as it
173 creates a number of tensions, conflicting ideas in a concrete situation what
in turn creates equivocal ‘messages’.
The novel presents deeper
philosophical point of view and the process of interpretation is never
ending. Jocelin, the central character in the novel, is obsessed with his
vision of raising a spire above his cathedral. As the novel progresses, we
see his vision as his ‘folly’ as well.
The tension between faith and reason is embodied again in the
fraught relationship of novel’s two central protagonists, Jocelin, the Dean
and Roger Masion, the architect. The SP is not only a diagram of prayer, it
is also a phallic image of Jocelin’s own desire for Goody Pangal, “the lust
that he had almost succeeded in concealing from himself” (Boyd:
85).Jocelin builds an awe-inspiring structure on a shaky foundation but he is
also forced to experience the tragedy and disgrace. He periodically escapes
upwards, but he is held earthbound by the shaky, creaky pillars. At the
close of the novel, he is struck by a mortal paralysis and makes a dying
attempt to find the meaning of his life’s work, a meaning which gradually
forms around the metaphor: ‘It’s like the apple tree!’ (SP: 223). It’s the
central argument, the knowledge of good and evil; it is the Tree of
Knowledge.
Golding like his contemporary novelists, does not delineate a
characters by direct narration, instead he probes deep into the subconscious
even to the unconscious, and loses himself in the complexities and subtleties
of inner life. The setting of the Darkness Visible is from 2nd World War to
the 70s. The two protagonists, Matty and Sophy, are symbolically thesis and
antithesis to each other though they are connected by their initial killings.
As the novel progresses, Matty is shown selfless, and a saintly figure as
contrasted to Sophy’s selfish motives, sexual excesses, and wanton
behaviour. Golding’s moral issues are never clear-cut as nothing can be
174 reduced to a single formula like the empirical science which has produced
more evils than good. Darkness Visible echoes the Lord of the Flies in so far
its symbol of fire and evil are concerned. Fire has been venerated in all ages
as the symbol of spirit as opposed to matter.
The Darkness Visible subverts its own denotation in a post
modernistic sense but its extremely ambivalent form of a moral perspective
and deeply disturbing impact on the readers mind is consciously designed so
that, “It destroys the binary opposition that is assumed to exist between
good and evil; shows that they are interdependent, the one incapable of
existing without the other. Thus, the novel explores the difficulties of
judgment in moral matters, the extremes of behaviour of which men are
capable, human beings’ paradoxical saintliness and sinfulness”(Icoz).
Golding penetrates and tries to see through the darkness and
mysteries. The Darkness Visible is structured around two diametrically
opposite characters, Matty and Sophy. The first part tells the story of
Matty’s Redemption; the second explores Sophy's regression through
outrageous behaviour. The third part shows the conflict of good and evil
amid a variety of people and their daily lives. Golding resorts to a
diagrammatic scheme and places his characters on straight lines of
evolution. Matty’s painful life is full of action; obsessed to love and be
loved and struggles with his divided face, burnt in fire, through out. His
journey is essentially spiritual; he is last seen in the glorifying proof of the
fire and later on, as a saint bathing in golden light, a healed and whole
being. Golding wanted to see him a tragic clown, a saint who leaves the
message that if damnation is a reality, then salvation is also possible.
Jocelin in The Spire is seen at war with himself. He faces the chaos
within in his search for a pattern. He imposes a pattern with the terrible
paradox of his vision. As the spire progresses, Jocelin learns new lessons
175 leading to his full blown consciousness. The paradoxical meaning, the
conflict of reason and faith gives way to insight. He, like his predecessor
Ralph and Sammy, moves to self–knowledge. The symbolism plays a great
role in all Golding novels. The Spire itself constitutes the central symbol
with its various interpretations. Finally, it meets the infinity in exultation
with the fusion of the magical world of good and evil.
Beyond the binary is beyond the reasoning bound in sensory organ or
intellect for intellect itself is bound in senses. All we reason out is bound up
in phenomenal world and this world has never been uniformly good or
uniformly bad. History bears the testimony that not only Christ was
crucified but millions are crushed by will or by chance to save others. A
balance has always been maintained. The total good and evil in this world
has always been in right proportion. Arieka realised that, “Limitation is a
fact of life” (DT: 139) till we are in this world of binaries. Complete
surrender is what god expects from human being. Golding skill fully yet
solemnly presents his idea of freedom through the words of Ionides, “When
you are sitting on the tripod you are the freest being in the world” (DT139);
that means beyond the binary is the one existence of god and god alone.
We can not say definitely that our forefathers were more happy or
worse than what we are now today. Binary speaks of the two sides of a coin
wound up finely with the threads of pleasure and pain, good and evil. No
human being has ever been satisfied with the state of the world. Every one
contributes to it at one or the other point, knowingly or unknowingly and
higher the senses, higher are the deliberate attempt to make the world
beautiful. Has the world been beautiful or has it ceased to be evil or free
from mystery?
176 The problem remains the same but the form changes. Vivekananda
pointed out that “We read and learn and are deceived with our own
knowledge” (4:240).This is exactly happened with Sammy Mountjoy. He
learnt from his school teacher that he can get everything in this world
paying the appropriate price. He had both the things together. At last, he
understood in the prison camp that his desire failed him and he realized it in
a state of trance in the dark cell amid his huge physical suffering,
excruciating mental agony of moral compunction. It is suffering that
illumined him shedding the burs of his sins and wrong doings off his soul.
A close analyses of the characters show that all the protagonists cried
for freedom. What we want out of our knowledge is freedom. A universal
cry of freedom is heard from every one, from every breast, from every
nooks and corners. Sammy, Matty, Simon- all cried for the same freedom.
Simon, an icon of humility, was the most advance of the characters as he
was the embodiment of freedom per se as he while dissolving into the ocean
reflected his absolute calm appearance through the hallowed presence. His
washing away in the shore was his embracing of infinite freedom leaving
behind this world of utility.
Similar examples we find in another saint, Shri Chaitanya
Mahaprabhu, in the last medieval period in Bengal in whose birth place is
the present ISKCON, Mayapur temple is built at ‘Nabadwip’ for world
wide spread of Krishna consciousness .The great saint merged his body in
the Indian ocean during his state of trance and absolute ecstasy in freedom.
Body consciousness was secondary or made little sense to him. He would
never feel a sense of elation if he got victory in his debates. Chaitanya was
called an ‘Avatar’ of Lord Krishna. Simon, the Christ figure has displayed
the similar qualities of what Chaitanya had as his last word to two of his
disciples: "Hari's(God) Name should always be chanted by him who must
177 be humbler than a blade of grass (which is trodden upon); who is more
patient, forbearing and charitable than a tree (which does not cry out even
when it is cut down, and which does not beg for water even when scorched
to death, but on the contrary, offers its treasure to whosoever seeks it, bears
the sun and rain itself but protects those who take shelter under it from rain
and sunshine); who, however worthy of esteem should, instead of claiming
respect for himself, give respect to all (from a sense of God's immanency in
all beings). He who thus takes Krishna's Name gets Krishnaprem"(Sivananda).
The kingfisher’s incoherent babble, the prattle of the priest like a
baby in the death bed (SP) is their search for freedom. Phenomenal world is
the seat of struggle, the battle field for all the creatures and human beings’
attempt to conquer it has ever been met with failure. The attempt to conquer
nature is also an attempt for freedom.
The world has ever been the same. All the binaries are to balance
each other, keeping the sum total intact. Here, one language is translated
into another or one kind of evil is giving way to another kind of evils; so
does the good. A set of thinkers replace another and the world moves on,
else, none could think , at least in countries where Marxism was a kind of
practical religion, that it will one day crumble giving way to another ism.
No ‘cracy’, no ism, or no dictates have ever been the final say. It is only one
set replacing the other following the changed circumstances but the total
result has curiously been the constant. All the isms have their own say and
the3n that exhausts.
Golding realized these well. He was well versed in ‘the Gita’ and all
the Indian scriptures. He knew that nothing can satisfy humanity
permanently. So long the world exists, as it would dot as such, there will be
all such divisions and demarcations, barriers and people would rise to the
178 occasion. But the centre remains unknown, un-attempted for. The centre is
practical religion for him. Different planes and isms are different planes
created by people. They intersect at different points what come out as
differentiations and we see growth. But he attempted one step further to
integrate all these differentiations into philosophical monism.
Absurdity of human existence, questions of permanence and
transience, good and evil, or the permanency or impermanency of human
existence are being talked about since our unknown past. In terms of
theories and practices we have no dearth of these in hundreds of varieties
but never has there been an occasion that a solution has been reached
permanently which clearly points out that all such deluding factors has
larger meaning for human being. Dr. Kadambari, professor of English,
university of Madras once made a clarification through e-mail on Golding
which is worth mentioning here regarding Golding’s thesis of human
existence.
“A famous interview with a lady journalist who asked Mr. Golding
how much time did Sammy take to die - the answer Golding gave was
eternity. He repeated this thrice when the lady asked him thrice
thinking that he did not understand her question. Golding is Darkness
Visible and stands for the dictum. Those who spoke had no revelation
and those who had the revelation never spoke - A saint truly”
We invent all theories and dictates and in the process we lull
ourselves into a state of temporary satisfaction of having made a solution.
Eventually, we end up pricking one intellectual needle after another with the
same result of awe and conundrum of human existence!
Since Golding avoided being reductive, Lord of the Flies has been
characterised many a places as a retelling of episodes from the Bible. This
179 description may be apparently an oversimplification but it echoes certain
Christian images and themes. The author does not make any explicit
connections to Christian symbolism in the Lord of the Flies; instead, these
biblical parallels function as a kind of subtle motif in the novel, adding
thematic resonance to the main ideas of the story. The island itself,
particularly Simon’s glade in the forest, recalls the Garden of Eden in its
status as an originally pristine place that is corrupted by the introduction of
evil. Similarly, we may see the Lord of the Flies as a representation of the
devil, for it works to promote evil among humankind. Furthermore, many
critics have drawn strong parallels between Simon and Jesus. Among the
boys, Simon is the one who arrives at the moral truth of the novel, and the
other boys kill him sacrificially as a consequence of having discovered this
truth. Simon’s conversation with the Lord of the Flies also parallels the
confrontation between Jesus and the devil during Jesus’ forty days in the
wilderness, as told in the Christian Gospels.
However, it is noteworthy that the parallels between Simon and
Christ on prima facie reading are not in exact level. The deeper analysis
leads one into the same degree of what Christ is meant for. There are limits
to reading Lord of the Flies purely as a Christian allegory. Simon lacks the
supernatural connection to God that Jesus has in Christian tradition except
for his two uncanny predictions of the future. Although Simon is wise in
many ways, his death does not bring salvation to the island; rather, his death
plunges the island deeper into savagery and moral guilt. Moreover, Simon
dies before he is able to tell the boys the truth he has discovered. Jesus, in
contrast, was killed while spreading his moral philosophy. In this way,
Simon—and Lord of the Flies as a whole—echoes Christian ideas and
themes without developing explicit parallels with them.
180 The novel’s biblical parallels enhance its moral themes but are not
necessarily the primary key to interpreting the story, for the author keeps it
open ended for the readers to go beyond their apparent limits of perception
and be engaged into a thought process that does not knock them over and
over again under intellectual conundrum, rather a revelations comes to them
that does not speak of or plead for any reason.
The Lord of the Flies is the bloody, severed sow’s head that Jack
places on a stake in the forest as an offering to the beast. This complicated
symbol becomes the most important image in the novel when Simon
confronts the sow’s head in the forest and it seems to speak to him that evil
lies within every human heart.
This evil within translates into Simon’s death of what he had little cue
of. In this way, the Lord of the Flies becomes both a physical manifestation
of the beast, a symbol of the power of evil, and a kind of Satan figure who
evokes the beast within each human being. Looking at the novel in the
context of biblical parallels, the Lord of the Flies recalls the devil, just as
Simon recalls Jesus. In fact, the name is a literal translation of the name of
the biblical name Beelzebub, a powerful demon in hell sometimes thought
to be the devil himself.
Golding thought of writing a book is a matter of hard work and harder
an author tries ,better would it become as his models like Joyce, Flaubert
and Mann were hard worker in testing how do all their words and sentences
produce music, the sound and the rhythm. Never did he think of the
intervention of the Muse for the spurt of inspiration in writing a fiction.
Golding realized later that hard work is not a matter of labourious task, but
an inspiration beyond that keeps one restless. Looking back at his career as
a celebrated and successful writer, he remained skeptic about where it all
came from.
181 The Double Tongue allowed him to express this sense of mystery that
he felt was an ineluctable part of the creative process. “I practice a craft I do
not understand and cannot describe”, Golding wrote earlier and he was
convinced that “there is a mystery about (the trade of the novelist), a
mystery in every sense of that ancient word” (Macumberia DT).
The primitive man in those distant days was brutes as it was thought
of by the modern man. But what precisely defined as brute was not clear.
They were not as civilized as the modernist yet what contrasts is their
ignorance of slaughtering any fellow being. They did not deluge the world
in blood for gaining control of material wealth and selfish gain. There was
no religious crusade, for their religion was based on unity of all being. So
they knew not any distinctions. The Neanderthal race is still a source of
motivation for all to be like one of them with supernatural power of sense
and sensibility. Golding as a literary genius certainly possessed such
superior sensibility to understand that and wanted the present gloomy world
to emulate
their forefathers so that certain balance is maintained or else,
the whole of the so called modern mankind might be gasping for moral
breathe.
The very title of the darkness visible was taken from Milton’s Paradise
Lost:
“No light, but rather darkness visible” Yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell…(Milton :5).
Several great ideas, philosophies etc. are put forward in the world. If
we take the example of the Vedas, it is found that all the ideas first
182 developed over a long period of time and slowly they fused into monism.
The Indians first questioned about the existence of the universe, “Where,
when, how did it come?” and the answer came, “Then there was neither
naught nor aught, nor air, nor sky, nor anything. Neither death nor
deathlessness” (1:351).The sages of the world found the answer of
cosmology in the external world which manifested as ‘Varuna’, ‘Apollo’,
‘Indra’ etc. Vivekananda affirms that “All these gods are ultimately raised
to the conception as Being in whom the whole universe exists. This is
monotheistic idea with which the Samhita is replete with”(1:346). The sages
were not content in discovering various gods as symbol of certain power,
they continued the search beyond; each god was sublimated in as much as
they became personal gods. The truth ultimately flashed upon them, “That
which exists is one, sages call it by various names” (1:347).
The Vedic description of the universe is that it was, “gloom hidden in
gloom” before the creation of this phenomenal universe and this whole
universe is a mass of vibrations, and the motion became finer and finer. It
existed unmoved, without vibration, but with vibration creation began.
Golding’s symbol of the conch is variously described by critics as a symbol
of power and authority or social control but it otherwise symbolizes the
secret of creation as its vibration has its ontological root of creation and
every time it vibrates people’s psyche churns to unknown secret that guides
all animate and inanimate being in the cosmos.
In the chapter, ‘To Delphi’, Arieka realises the sense of timelessness
and non duality amid duality: “there is a void when the gods have been
there, then turned their backs and gone. Before this void as before an altar
there is nothing but grief contemplating the void. Time passes but
irrelevantly. The void with the grief before it is eternal (DT23).During her
journey as the bride of Ionides she was deeply engrossed into the ultimate
183 question of human salvation, “The future. My future. All the questions.
Where? How? What (DT 38)?
Golding realised well that it is the god’s world, which moves the way He
likes and we are the mere players in the process, but that does not mean that
we are just the passive spectators as His hand -made tools as it is made clear
through the words of Pythia: “Who can compel the gods? Any man or
women? You” (DT 38)?
So, all the struggles in the form of binary opposition or in any other
form is only to realize the higher truth that it is only one truth manifested as
many. All the forms, various though they are, have to struggle as cosmology
says that the creation of the world was a matter of will and will manifest
itself as desire. “This idea of will is found in German philosophy and forms
the basis of Schopenhauer’s system of philosophy (1:351).Binary comprises
various ideas, philosophical speculations, and interpretations that begins
with the Dualism or Dvaita and ends with non-dualism or Advaita.
Through ages there are conflict of theories and theorists. All the isms
have come and colored the world. They have got their own followers. But,
then, where does the proof or reasonability lie? The truth lies in the
constitutional variety of human being as every isms or their acceptance
depend on human reasoning. Vivekananda has made it clear that, “The first
principle of reasoning is that the particular is explained by the general, the
general by the more general, until we come to the universal and the
universal in essence is the existence as we all are in it” (1:353).
The author leaves a clear direction for human being for the path to go
the limits of this world and move beyond the binaries, and hence, the
mundane and the subtle in the guise of Arieka and Ionides have to move on
184 till perfection comes, “All that matters is that we should both move toward
the desired end. The first step is the hexameter” (DT 59).
According to Romain Rolland’s version of duality and non-duality,
“the second the non-dualist recognises Brahma as the only reality , but gives
to the world d of appearances , to individual souls, the value of
modifications or modes which are not illusory ,but are radiant with the
attributes of Brahman.”(Rolland 38).Golding’s world is exactly relates to
the school of Vishishtadvaita or qualified monism.
Romain Rolland affirms in his book on shri Ramakrishna, “To Ramakrishna
Maya itself was God, for everything was God” (Rolland36).
The most clear definition and understanding of this universe in the shortest
possible words is given by shri Ramakrishna:
When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive, neither creating, nor
preserving, nor destroying, I call Him Brahma or Purusha, the
impersonal God. When I think of Him as active, creating, preserving,
destroying, I call Him Shakti or Maya or Prakriti, the personal God.
But the distinction between them does not mean a difference .The
personal and the impersonal are the same Being, in the same way as
milk and its whiteness, or the diamond and its lustre, or the serpent
and its undulations. It is impossible to conceive of the one without the
other (Rolland36).
Golding’s attempt is close to the school of ‘qualified Advaitists’ such
as Ramanuja whose object “was to make use of it (Maya) for the evolution
of individual souls” (Rolland38).Romain Rolland’s research and lifelong
study on shri Ramakrishna can be contrasted with Golding’s understanding
of the world as the former affirms that, “In fact Ramakrishna distinguishes
two distinct planes and stages of vision: that under the sign of Maya, which
185 creates the reality of the ‘differentiated’ universe, and the supervision of
perfect contemplation(Samadhi) wherein one instant’s contact with the
Infinite is sufficient to make the illusion of all ‘differentiated’ egos, our own
and other men’s, disappear immediately. But Ramakrishna expressly
maintains that it is absurd to pretend that the world is unreal so long we
form part of it, and receive from it for the maintenance of our own
identity…” (Rolland 40).
Explanation of a thing is always referring a particular to a higher
concept of its kind. Human mind is a store house of such numerous
generalizations and whenever an idea comes to our mind we compare and
contrast with our stored up material and make a conclusion. Thus, we form
our knowledge of a subject and thus knowledge is a matter of classification.
But in another way, the explanation of a thing must be from inside, not
outside. Any natural phenomenon proves that the cause of an effect or the
occurrence is stored inside the nature, not existing outside. For example,
heat, magnetism, gravitation, light etc. are intrinsic phenomena of nature, in
the very heart of it.
The Free Fall is an experiment with a metaphorical structure around
the binary world, a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in
relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under
the force of gravity. The myth is the fall of man, the expulsion from
paradise. The hero, Sammy, seeks to discover a pattern between the binary
worlds of experience, the one is deterministic, empirical and the other is a
world of horror and glory, heaven and hell.
Golding here has made a commentary upon – good and evil, guilt
and innocence and the taste of isolation. The protagonist in the novel
Sammy Mount Joy, is an artist who is involved through the first person
narrative his moment of fall in his life. While previously, Golding had been
186 interested in isolation, in depicting groups and individuals struggling for
survival: in future, in the past and even in a world of his character’s own
making, now he portrays an individual in the contemporary modern world.
The theme of novel is clear from the title itself from its two words ‘free’ and
‘fall’. This is the perennial conflict in Golding novel; Man is doomed by
Original Sin, and fall is a reality. Yet the will remains free; self destruction
is a matter of choice. It’s made clear for Sammy’s world that there is a gap
between innocence and experience. The moral way of explaining this gap is
to look for an action,” a freely chosen crossing of some moral Rubicon”
(Weeks: 174) that determine decisions and actions.
The two worlds between which his life is suspended are represented
by a religious school mistress, Rowena Pringle and a science teacher,
Nick. The child does not have to choose;”in childhood the two worlds
interlock” (Kermode: 64).These inter locked worlds are as important to
shape Sammy’s life as the slum and its living conditions in Rotten Row.
Sammy moves between them without realizing their incompatibility. Miss
Pringle was frustrated religious Puritan, mean and cruel. In all Golding’s
novel there is an explicit treatment of debate between a rational or scientific
view of the world and a more intuitive and generally religious attitude, an
opposition which has been treated of in many great works of English
literature since the days of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The tension between the two is often embodied in two distinct
characters: Simon and Piggy (LF), Roger Mason and Jocelin (SP) Edwin
Bell and Sim Goodchild (DV) and Edmund Talbot and Robert James Colley
(RP). We are confronted with the debate of Martin’s death (PM) at the end
of the book. Campbell wonders about how Martin can survive once he is
dead. He believes that the drowned man cannot suffer as he could not even
kick off his sea boots. It is an earth–bound answer to the death as it is about
187 the love of Sammy to Beatrice. Davidson understands the drift and believes
in spiritual survival. S.J. Boyd comments that the novel can be read in two
ways: “as a disappearance into the great purple dark of nonentity or as an
entry into a spiritual realm that is three times real” (Boyd: 76). Both the
views, notwithstanding the empirical criticism on it, seem possible and
defensible.
In the case of Sammy in Free Fall, he is overwhelmed by the two
world views are true. The best can be said of each view is ‘may be’. He is
subjected to the influence of his environment and the factor of heredity also
can not be denied as both the factors are responsible to shape a man’s
personality. It is quite plausible to call him deviant following sociological
principles. Robert K. Merton, the famous sociologist, noted that
ambivalence is common to all forms of deviant behavior. In case of
ambivalence an actor feels the moral validity of the societal norms but he
also feels alienated from it for one reason or another.
It is noted that, “an ambivalent person may permanently repress the
negative or alternative side of his motivation, may repress the confirmative
side, or may vacillate, one side being regnant for a time and the other
breaking through” (Johnson: 563).Sammy’s illegitimate birth and the lower
class environment he is subjected to in the boyhood slum of Rotten Row
justify his ambivalent attitude in his adolescent period. It is already stated
that his boyhood companions are evil. A conflict of good and evil is a
continuous process in his mind. Sammy chooses the good Being of Nick
but, “there comes a time however Sammy uses Nick’s philosophy to deny
the goddess for which he chose it” (Weeks: 88). The wine of sex is spilt in
the children’s blood and Sammy discovers not only the light in her face and
her beauty, but by the body that holds them. He witnesses in school that the
attractive French mistress and the games–master are caught together in a
188 compromising position from the school for their deviant behavior and that
sends a shudder of pleasure round the school.
In Lord of the Flies we have seen the innate depravity of man. The
boys are divided between binary splits, Ralph’s tribe and Jack’s tribe: One is
for order and civilized norms; the other is for normslessness, hunting,
painting the faces to hide the shame and self consciousness. Jack wields
move power and authority with more followers than Ralph. We are attracted
to evil more from the fact of our propensity to evil. Sammy also gets the
idea of possessing Beatrice sexually from such thriller of the games teacher.
This is the nature of sex, dangerous, forbidden, but utterly fascinating fruit
and Sammy is enthralled. Sammy follows Nick, but “in Nick’s rational and
scientific universe there is no place for the mysterious irrationality of sex…”
The root of evil, for Nick, is to brand sex as shameful or to reduce it to trick.
Sammy views sex as Devil’s trick and he wants to espouse it for his
compulsion to possess Beatrice. He converts Nick’s rationalism into an
egotistic ethic where good and evil become relative.
Like Milton’s Satan, he becomes absolute master of his being and
allows his desire to rule him without any moral validity. Nick’s reasoning
helps him to rationalize his lusts. Beatrice, he remembers, “In my too
susceptible mind sex dressed itself in gorgeous colours, brilliant and evil…”
(FF: 231). Sammy declares Satan-like, “Musk shameful and heady be thou
my good” (FF: 232). Nick’s soulless universe is fitted to him like gloves.
Frederic Karl observes, “In an amoral world, Sammy has behaved
rationally, unaware that rationality can be a kind of evil, especially when
attracted to a voracious ego” (Karl: 255).
There is a clear echo of the Inheritors in the Double Tongue as when
Arieka says, “I have been reading about the oracles. This time it was about
the legend and saying that the Old Religion was woman’s. Saying that some
189 of the images are buried and have been dug up-monstrous fat woman“(78).Certainly, Oa was the woman in The Inheritors to have mothered the
progenies of innocent people and who was regarded as the goddess in the
tribe as she perpetuated the religious values. But the new people killed that
goddess as monstrous fat woman. Arieka is representative of such iconic
lady of innocence and purity.
The same purity was evoked in Sammy. His experiences of Halde’s
torture amounts to be a form of purgatory, a state which Dante imagines as a
great mountain up which souls strive toward bliss, a mountain of pain
misery and joy. When he cries out in terror: “Help me! Help me!” (FF: 184).
It is a total surrender of the self to the other. He leaves behind his ego– “I
was dead away myself”, and he emerges from the cell, “a man resurrected”
(FF: 186).
This pattern of symbolic death and rebirth, this decent into and
emergence from darkness, is found elsewhere in Golding’s fiction: Simon’s
confrontation with the embodiment of evil, the Lord of the Files, culminates
into his prophetic fit and death; Matty, the holy fool of Darkness Visible,
organises for himself an extraordinary trial
in the desert in which he
submerges himself in the primeval slime to emerge with renewed strength
from his prophetic and ultimate self-immolation
through purity. These
pathetic and tragic states seem to enhance the insight, the vision and
prophetic powers of those who undergo their agonies. Frank Kermode
observes that “the novel is about delivery from the body of this death; not
only about the fall but also about regeneration” (65). Sammy, who seems in
other way no prophets, emerges with an intense religious apprehension of
the world, a prophetic vision of his own filthiness and evil.
Once Sammy discovered his sin and realizes the sanctity of the
individual, he goes to see Beatrice .He finds her in a sanatorium where she
190 has been since last seven year after Sammy deserted her. When he force her
to speak and attempts to make his presence felt, she urinates in fright. When
Sammy seeks o pin down how guilty he is, the doctor replies: You probably
tipped her over. The damage done is irreparable. She is reduced to
subhuman level and remains “the image of betrayed women, of outraged
and helpless innocence” (FF: 127).The wretchedness of Beatrice magnifies
the consequences of Sammy’s sin caused by human pride. The novel here
sifts from Sammy self-examination to the disastrous effect of his pride on
other. At this point a change of point of view occurs as usual in Golding
novel. The novel was originally concerned with Sammy’s loss of freedom,
with the interior issue, reflected by implication inside other human beings.
By making the issue exterior, the ending is both exaggerated and simplified
concerning man guilty and evil.
Now in the final chapter, Sammy attempt to communicate his insight
to his ‘spiritual parents’, Nick and Rowena. He understands that innocent
people like Johnny, Nick and infant Samuel, and the wicked like Pringle and
Philip live in one world. They do not recognize any need for forgiveness.
But Sammy is among “the guilty” (FF: 251), a different category of people
between innocent and wicked. He finds himself falling freely between the
spiritual and the rational, cause and effect. “Both the world exists side by
side. They meet in me” (FF: 244). He concluded that, “both worlds are real,
there is no bridge” (7).
Sammy argues for himself with a degree of self-justification as well
as guilty reproach. He asks questions only to understand the mystery of the
world-the conflict of good and evil as it was in the case of Lord of the Files.
Sammy finds life as a “primordial chaos” (FF: 174). Here two questions are
worth quoting. Sammy asked at the beginning, “Is it a patter I am looking
for” (FF: 6)? At the end, he realizes, ‘there is no bridge’. What Golding
191 wants the reader is not to reduce anything into a fixed pattern. On the last
page he expressed it by sphinx’s riddle in which four simple sentences were
written that puzzled Sammy. Here, we are given an opportunity to view the
world without any pattern. Mark Kinkead observes here: “They mean too
much, too contradictory... the moment we ‘explain’ them as meaning one
thing … we fall again into pattern, into reduction” (197). As a poetic
novelist Golding wants us to find a right answer for the pattern without
being reductive. The riddle lie with the ‘I’ as Sammy asks, “Is man no more
than the I?” However, Sammy’s experience in the prison cell provides the
affirmation.
The whole problem lies with the ‘I’. The questions are answered at
the end of the chapter on Pincher Martin. So long as one cannot free oneself
of the ‘I’, of the burden of the finite consciousness, one continues to be
guilty and ‘fall down’ (PM: 251). His nature continues to be flawed and
guilt ridden. But once he is purged of his ego, as Sammy in the prison cell,
he can regain the wholeness of his being and see harmony all around.
Professor Subba Roa comments here that: “However, such moment of
revelation cannot… save from self condemnation and provide an enduring
inner harmony” (66). Sammy comes closer to Matty and Jocelin in his tragic
awareness of the ‘natural chaos of existence’. Matty stands for ‘good’ in
Darkness Visible but the novel shows Good and Evil as completely
independent, the one incapable of existing without the other. The central
movement within the novel is towards reconciliation, and “the idea of unity
is pervasive throughout the novel” (Sinfield: 165).The same concept we find
in the Vedanta philosophy that the play of good and evil is the diverse
manifestation of one unity. Man is the marker of his own fortune. Golding
too in the same vein accepts the defects of society as the result of defective
human nature. In Darkness Visible he shows darkness is man-shaped and
evil resides in humanity’s innermost nature.
192 Sammy is presented as an artist. Golding himself has admitted that his
art test people to destruction to get at the truth. He tortures Beatrice and in
turn suffers hellish torments. The artist is confounded in the maze of good
and evil in this world. He stands as both torturer and victim. Golding seems
to have intended his reader to become conscious, to gain awareness of his or
her kinship with Sammy. There are Mountjoy – like trends and impulses in
all human being because such trends are part of human nature. But for this
awareness to be a gain, and not a dead loss of hope, we must step beyond
the desolating perception.
Sammy is bound to accept responsibilities for his evil deeds and he
pays for that as well. We hope to understand and be understood. We want to
move from ignorance to knowledge. In case of Sammy‘s awareness
Verginia Tiger comments, “The bridge between the grey world of flesh and
golden world of spirit might have been in the darkened cell with its
reductive process; a kind of whipping which releases moral energies from
their paralysis” (Tyger: 42). Sammy is redeemed by his ordeal in the dark
cell and emerges as good in the dark cell and emerges as good in the end.
Sammy, the artist, resembles his creator in one important respect: his art
grow out of a fearless contemplation of the darkness of the human heart, a
heroic delving into muddy pool of human sin and depravity. Jocelin in The
Spire learns that, a work of art that towers into the heaven involves digging
deep into the stinking pit of the self .Sammy also falls to rises again.
It appears from the analysis that evil and unhappiness are unavoidable
in the world of binary; that it is man’s fate to both inflict and to endure
suffering. Evil and pain are everywhere. “We are all guilty. We fall down.
We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other” (FF: 190).
This is our condition,” and this guilty is the condition of transcendence”
(Sinfield: 165).
193 The straight answer to the question of beyond the binary is given by
the author himself in very clear terms in the Double Tongue. Unlike the
world God is beyond the time-space-causation and any creation or work of
art made by any human being also has to be under the bounds by the same
factor. Homer, for example, created a better verse than god himself as he
was inspired by Him yet he was under the limiting factor of binary world,
what god is not. In other terms, the hexameter was not meant for general
people who could not cross the limits of this world of Maya and for them it
would be quite insipid an idea and hence, inferior.
A handful of poets or seer, according to Golding, realised the truth or
infinity and left behind the verse that could relate both the world of limit
and limitless and lead one to the world of monism at an appropriate time.
What Golding lamented as ‘there is no bridge’ is that one has to go on from
ignorance to self-knowledge and there is no in- betweens. God’s verse is a
matter of infinity and how finitude could have the grasp of it? Thus he
questions, “But there was something else. The hexameter weren’t very good
yet Apollo was the god of the arts-of poetry! Why was his verse inferior to
Homer’s? Why was it that there were half a dozen poets who could create
better verse than Apollo?” (101).
The Spire, like free fall is an investigation of two different worlds: the
spirit and the flesh, the faith and the reason, but unlike Free Fall, The Spire
moves towards an emphatic resolution. The novel is a work of art per se in
which the author has expended a great deal of imagination in presenting
conflicting ideas in tension in a concrete situation and the protagonist
gradually progresses from ignorance to Enlightment. The novel tells a story
Dean Joceline’s dream of a spire on his cathedral which would symbolize
man’s praise of God, but the spire is flawed by Joceline’s motives,
impracticability and corruption.
194 Finally, the spire is built by appalling personal prices and almost at
the cost of Joceline’s faith itself as “the book is about the human cost of
building the spire” (McCarron: 22). The New Men also in The Inheritors
had to pay awesome price for their progress in the evolutionary ladder.
Jocelin, in the end, learns about human nature and life itself as a miracle,
rooted deeply in both innocence and guilt, in beauty and in blood and the
story towards the end reconciles the two worlds. Jocelin dominates the
scene with his vision of the spire as a ‘crowning glory’ surmounting his
cathedral, which he saw many years earlier. He laughs, and cries with
happiness as God seems to explode through the stained glass. He looks
contended as the story of Abraham and Isaac; passes by him. In a state of
high spirit and faith, he keeps the eye half closed and chants such words as
joy, love, patience and glory. As he pushes on with his ambition he comes to
understand his own past, his motives and the human cost involved in his
enterprise. It is the progress of understanding that is the chief movement in
the novel.
The novel now makes us aware of the awful forces and internal
turmoil surrounding four major characters, in other terms, they stand as,
four human pillars at the cross ways: Roger Mason, the chief builder and his
wife Rachel; Pangal and his wife Goody. There is human corruption all
around. He begins to be aware of the growing relation between Pangal’s
wife and Roger Mason as they meet secretly. Both Rachel and Pangal are
impotent. Both Roger and Goody are in some short of tent that shut them off
from the rest of the world. Jocelin realizes that “the renewing life of the
world was a filthy thing, a rising tide of muck…” (SP: 58). The story looks
like ‘dully rich’ and ‘the light of the alter was a divided thing’. (SP: 62). He
is tormented by the people around him. Thus, a divided light, a dichotomy
of dull and rich keeps progressing throughout.
195 William Golding is a religious novelist and the novels are structured
almost entirely on the acceptance of the authenticity of their Christian
parallels played through binaries. He has shown in FF that, “Man is doomed
by Original Sin, and Fall is a reality” (Green 92). Joceline’s faith on God is
his arrogant assumption of God’s favour which in turn grows into pride–a
deadly sin. He is subjected to other deadly sins also which results in Chaos
and sacrifices. His big dare is a mark of pride against his envy and lust in
the alleged involvement of Goody and Roger. Big dare contrasts his lust
through the sexual dream and un-fulfillment results in his heated argument
with Anselm, the sacrist. He fires an arrow of love, casting himself
unknowingly in the role of Love–God or Eros.
His sexual desire for Goody is a desire for self–glorification. Lust
and pride are at the root of much evil in Jocelin. In his sexual dream he sees
the devil masturbates the phallus/spire of his body and leaves the question
whether the spire is a self-fulfillment or a distortion of God-given creativity.
The answer lies in the name of Roger mason. Just as Mason means trade as
builder, Roger has a slang meaning ‘to copulate with’, indicating Roger’s
sexual energy. The spire is a blatant image of Joceline’s desire for Goody, a
substitute for consummation engineered by Roger and he achieves that at
the heart of the church. But just as the spire itself stands in defiance of any
logic, any “reductive symbolism” (McCarron 23) is untenable. After all,
Jocelin does both, glorify by erecting a spire, and profane by desecrating the
church.
Throughout the novel, the dichotomy of good and evil, sacred and
profane or light and darkness are mixed to give meaning of a part of the
whole. Cross–lights play continuously on the actions of the characters in
which the conflict of good and evil looks like only a matter of degree and
one changes to other. The novel opens with Jocelin standing in exploded
196 light: “God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight
through painted glass” (SP. P. 7). Then he finds the most solid thing is the
light that smashes through the rows of windows and explodes colours. It
illuminates the naive and plays on dust.
Joceline builds the spire with the conflict of sunlight and dust and it
ends with neither light nor dust, but sun dust. The novel progresses with the
changing of colours, from light to shade and vice versa. He thinks that mind
touches with law but he himself is ignorant of the fact. His smile is a self–
indulgence with what the enterprise began. When the work progresses there
is light ‘up there’, with rain and cloud darkness descends what makes the pit
look horrible and evil rises from it. Sudden flashes of light drives his
ignorance momentarily as it happened during Pangal’s ritual killing. There
is ambiguous light that cuts him off from the realization of the reality. He
has always dreamt of Goody and the brilliance of her brilliant hair cuts him
off from heaven. The divided light at the altar has made it clear that there is
a conflict and “Golding’s novels never have one unequivocal message”
(Skitton: 157).
Jocelin now has become a man of experience, a searching brain in a
broken body who perceives the physical beauty, acknowledges love and
identifies the Beast within as Simon did. The dual experiences of spirituality
and blindness of vision, love and cruelty of human being follow the pattern
of death and resurrection, dying to give new life. Jocelin enacts the typical
Golding character: to achieve the beauty and goodness of the spire he must
explore his own evil, he must suffer to rise again with unvitiated vision.
Jocelin commits the evil, suffers and gains the knowledge of good and evil
for “he understood there was more to the apple tree … and this made him
weep in a childish way so that he could not tell whether he was glad or
sorry” (SP: 205). Something more to the apple tree points to his newly
197 acquired awareness of the mystery of life. Subba Rao observes that: “The
image embodies his apprehension of the problem of good and evil in all its
ramifications. All human enterprise is a curious mixture of good and evil,
the benign and the malign, the beautiful and the ugly. One is as ineluctable
and real as the other (128).
Arieka and Ionides are binary opposites not only as male and female
but as thesis and antithesis to each other in terms of their thought and
character. Further, Golding clarifies the place of Arieka in this world
through the mouth of Ionides who was only a surface, no depth. Arieka or
Golding was born in the world of binary only to steer clear of such bondage
to move beyond as it is stated through Ionides most explicitly:
News of your suitability for mediating between the physical universe
and the spiritual cosmos has brought it a shower of gifts from people
who do not want to ask a question at the moment but feel they may
do-kings, sitting as they always do on shaky thrones, rich
businessman, uneasy key men from caucuses, tyrants and terrorists. It
is the future ,and like the rest of us Greeks they are condemned to
move backward toward it, until the last bit when the ferryman takes
them backwards beyond all question (DT 70).
The author shows here the world of binary and then beyond it. Golding, the
Pythia of this world mediated between this physical universe and the ream
of spirituality. He distinguishes between the universe and cosmos.
Ordinary people engaged in the phenomenal world can not imagine of
the universe, let alone of the cosmos. All have some doubts about the truth
of this world and that is fine in its own way as that alone help them leap
forward. The questioning continues in this universe of time-space-causation
(desha-kala-nimitva) and when one overcomes the bounds of it and enters
198 the world of spirituality, in a limited way the company of the ferryman, all
questioning stops, the way a honey bee stops buzzing when it sits on the
flower and becomes unmindful of the world sucking the honey. But if we
move away from facing the truth, certainly the ferryman would drag us
backward. Golding’s ferryman is a similar figure of Indian myth of Yam raj,
who also waits to guide the dead to the gate of hell or heaven according to
the fruits one accrue in this world.
‘Home’ has been a beautiful symbol in the Double Tongue as Arieka
has always craved for a home which symbolizes universal love what was
missing in the world and what the world paid a huge price for, “I was
wishing I had a home. What I think of as a home. That place down there by
the sea wasn’t a home for anyone….A home. A place that welcomes you
and people there who wait for your coming with- love. That’s what I want.
A home” (71).
The apple tree (SP) appears as a mysterious light of mythology that
answers for: what is beyond? What is real? The answer lies in every
religion. Joceline’s struggle is the eternal struggle to attain freedom much
the same way as the Vedantist knows the nature of every soul as one with
Existence, Knowledge, and Freedom. We pursue our mad careers in the
external world of the senses, in the worlds of joys and sorrows as Jocelin
does. If Fall is a reality then, Rise is also a reality. All religions hold that
man is a degeneration of what he was and in his journey through the
phenomenal world he falls by eating the forbidden fruit yet, resurrects to his
real state of freedom. Swami Vivekananda’s explanation of the Bible and
the Vedanta comes closer to Joceline’s experience of fall and resurrection:
Take the Bible, for instance. You find there the allegorical statement
that the first man, Adam, was pure, and that his purity was obliterated
by his
evil deeds after words… The impurities that we see… are
199 but
Superimpositions on that nature. And the subsequent history of
Christian
religion shows that they also believe in the possibility,
nay, the certainty,
of regaining that old state. This is the whole
history of the Bible, Old and New Testaments together (Vedanta:
178).
Ralph’s eyes in The Lord of the Flies proclaim no devil yet, he falls
to savagery gradually. At last he weeps for Piggy, for Simon and for his
better recognition of darkness and the fall. Jocelin also weeps like a big
baby and he rises as he sinks by his realization of the mystery of life, “The
tragic-comedy of the human condition than ever Father Adam, a man of
genuine devotion, could” (Boyd 98).In the gutter Jocelin, swamped by
clouds of darkness, sees himself “lying stripped in death of clothing…” (SP:
219) but the mystery of the spire impinges on his retina: “Only the present
knowledge was a kind of freedom so that his thought went trotting away like
a horse un-harnessed from the cart” (SP: 221).
Here, Jocelin is freed from his body and exists as spirit which is unharnessed. This is the real nature of our Being. Jocelin now probes the
whole truth; “the ungainly and splintered octagons” (SP: 220) and the entire
human enterprise flashes before his eyes. The ending of Golding’s novel is
extremely important as there is vital shift of meaning. Father Adam prepares
for last rites to help him into heaven. There is however no tragic insight
which redeems the tragic victim from the evil he has caused. The
sympathetic Father Adam looks for a gesture of assent before he can
administer communion to the dying Jocelin and “of the charity to which he
had access, he laid the Host on the dead man’s tongue” (SP: 221). Adam
imagines a cry of God! God! God! For at the end, “he saw a tremor of the
lips”. (SP: 221). The act is seen to be irrelevant as there had been no gesture
200 of assent and he is dead anyway. Jocelin has gone beyond any simple
solution and died in despair. But this despairing is to reinforce the message
of the book which is both visionary and equivocal.
The physical growth of the spire runs parallel with the development
of Joceline’s own consciousness. The story constantly turns back on itself in
search of its own significance. Jocelin’s final assent is not to Father Adam,
but to the beautiful maimed spire: “He looked up experimentally to see if at
this late hour the witchcraft had left him; and there was the tangle of hair,
blazing among the stars; and the great club of his spire lifted towards it.
That’s all, he thought, that the explanation if I had time:” (SP: 221). Like the
sexual love of Berenice, the spire can be seen as an erect phallas lifted
towards the girl what he consciously concealed through out. The kind of
love he thought he had and the kind that made the vision are reconciled
here, as the red hair of the woman he lusted after hangs now between him
and heaven, preventing prayer.
Golding is true to the medieval setting of The Spire by presenting the
Tree of cross as the medieval people believe that the wood of the Tree of
Knowledge was used to form the cross. The combination of the two trees is
not blasphemous as it in its all encompassing nature bridges the gap
between earth and heaven, bears the message that good and evil in larger
context are fall and redemption. The tree of spire being many branched
image of our life, it demands to be likened as the Life–Tree, or World Tree.
The sameness of eternal human experience is evoked in the world of the
spire in a sense that despite all the many coloured changes in manners and
beliefs, we remain the same creatures struggling between the forces of good
and evil, between earth and heaven. The cathedral as the microcosm of the
universal order stands on human pillars, the substance of which is “a kind of
vital morality”. (FF: 189). In this substance reason and faith, good and evil
201 are necessary ingredients and are in constant war threatening at times the
order to fall, yet the order stands as ‘crooked beauty’. The beauty is flawed
by the imperfection of human enterprise but it can not fall. The order is
eternal and an embodiment of goodness that stands beyond time for ‘an
upward waterfall’ is an impossibility or mystic in its conception.
The tree of the spire is a holy book that contains both the lessons of
good and evil, fall and redemption and if the book is followed in right
earnest it can provide the keys to their clear interpretation and also form a
ladder to heaven. The seeker of truth and goodness is also likely to be
distracted or lost as the tree of the spire is many branched while holding its
head towards heaven. Truth and goodness seem highly complex and
confusing. Truth is pure, all–knowledge and invigorates a man to seek
higher goals. Truth and goodness can not be reduced to following a strict
code of rules or else Father Adam and Anselm with their strict adherence to
rules and scriptures would have been better characters than Jocelin. It is
Jocelin who glimpses “the universal Adam in his pride of hell” (Weeks:
232).
Truth and goodness we might usefully combine in a single word
wisdom which can be glimpsed out of the very corner of our eyes because
we have come across the developing consciousness of Jocelin in whom
“wild flashes of thought split the darkness”(SP: 220) of all confusion. Until
such time he has undergone an unconscious struggle of the human mind
with the spiritual, of the lower with the higher mind what was made clear by
the image of the raven and mayfly, and the struggle has preserved his
separate life what can be called his individuality. This individuality he gains
under the tree of knowledge as his religious experience. The spire itself is
metaphor of such religious experience. Golding as a religious novelist has
made it his task to break down all false illusions from the minds of the post
202 war people who serve the dry reason as their god and clash ignorantly in
absence of any spiritual light. As a ‘spiritual cosmologist’ Golding sets his
spire as a symbol of wisdom to set the clear goal and hope for humanity.
Absence of such wisdom from human society as we have witnessed in the
Lord of the Flies will leave us all in a forest of brutes. The experience of
Jocelin is patterned relevant to human experience of the present day world
in which we can identify ourselves with the moral modes, with the right
knowledge to create a bridge between man and the universe. The spire as a
source of knowledge and religious experience is a unity in itself for “in all
religions of the world you will find it claimed that there is a unity within us
… knowledge means finding this unity” (Vedanta: 91).
Golding has described himself as a novelist, a citizen and a school
master. The citizen is concerned with the defects of society and the
schoolmaster is concerned to impart the right knowledge. Hence his novels
are conscious intentions, not entirely as a form of abstract moral
propositions, but as a plan with meaning and purpose. Consequently the
novels tend to be densely textured with a patterned meaning and the
characters function as exemplars of facets of man’s nature: pride, greed,
faith, reason etc. accounting for a comprehensive knowledge beyond the
forces of good and evil – the Tree of Knowledge.
Sometimes situation so arises that people of substance prefer to be
silent and silence has a lot of answers hidden in it. All the questions or some
specific question at least can not be answered in any empirical terms in n
this rational world. People
bound with the limits of time-space-causation
must live in two levels as both sense and supra sense, phenomenal and
spiritual worlds are present with differential presence. Golding must have
left behind the rational world where both good and evil are curiously mixed
and in which one must make a choice. Through Pythia’s character Golding
203 was ready to do any thing to serve the world even as a rustic fellow, to get
out of the mess of the rational world, to cure the ills of it, “Anything
sometimes to break out of the sad rational world” (85)!
The question of Greek or Roman superiority and deserved freedom of
any one of the two, Arieka or the Pythia is vexed with as to which side to
back so as to avoid the wrong choice and the situation is too much for her as
it is symbolic of the conflict between rational and spiritual world and
Golding rescues Pythia in her choice, in turn he shows how to behave or
react in a vexed situation,
“I’ll answer that one, though the god knows it’s a toss-up between
two dictators…But it is public and dramatic occasion. I myself am
prone sometimes to drama which becomes melodrama. ….’Even
though you will be invisible, it’s your show’ (85)!
Further, the name of Ionides and Arieka, both dialectically opposite,
yet, they can be explained in terms of modern science of physics or
chemistry as the former’s name begins with ion which may be positively or
negatively charged particle. Where as Arieka is free air which
accommodates all the gaseous substances and floating particles. Air is one
of the most essential elements for life to germinate and pull on. Arieka has
fulfilled her scientifically assigned task to this world while accommodating
the mundane and the quintessential together. Ionides has ever been
differently charged as while editing the LF and scrapping the matters of
Simon as a divine presence in the book, he took to negative charge, though
it was his limits. Certainly, with the publication of the Double Tongue, Mr.
Monteith, and along with him, so many readers of the world have well
understood the depth of Golding and transformed mind with positive charge.
That’s the height of a genius who creates a Theurgy for ever to act upon
human mind.
204 Arieka explains her understanding of Ionides:
“Most of his mind was a kind of shell of opinions and brittle quips.
Inside the shell was a mind made up and closed to change because it
was really a prime tenet of his that he knew. In the shell itself was
contrary opinions which he produced together with their opposites so
that he was secure from having to believe in any of them”(DT 99).
What Ionides speaks is full of contradictions as he was not an inspired
soul. The oracle is the centre of god’s power, a theurgist manifestation. It
has its mystery beyond the judgment of ordinary people, for the words
seemed to be often riddling and unintelligible to common folk. Right
interpretation requires visionary power as the story of Burmese blind men
holds good here who understood what an elephant was like by their own
touch and feel, yet the judgment was certainly not complete to one who has
eyes. Further, there is truth that eludes the biological eyes. Eyes don’t see. It
is the mind behind the physical eye that only has the power to see.
Similarly, absolute truth, simple though, requires the power of mind, a
visionary eye to grasp of it. It is just not an empirical fact to believe or to
understand, but to be perceived and Golding is one rare genius who could
speak through his protagonist his power of such unique realization of god’s
power. Were it not the power of vision it would not have carried such
enormous influence and the same power of hidden centre of existence that
move our mind:
“I began to see how the oracle, like Ionides, was surrounded by
contradictions. Whatever lay at the centre of the oracle, that
mysterious heart of it which spoke so often with riddling words so
that only a suppliant who was both wise and humble could choose the
205 right interpretations, I believed, no I felt I knew there was something
connected with the hidden centre of existence that lay there and
sometimes spoke” (DT 99).
Arieka herself, at times, makes self introspection about the oracle as
to how it is so difficult to come by and how it is always concocted through
the ages. People were not ready even to accept the simple empirical fact of
astronomy that the earth moves round the sun and pronouncement of what
sent Galileo to gallows even in the 15th century. Golding has given enough
caution and lifeline as to the interpretation of the hexameter through which
the subtle truth of god is told. When people commit the mistake of making
prophesy without attaining it, god certainly, according to Golding, makes
‘rollicking laughter’ and for him such double-tongued prophesy shatters any
human hope of progress in real sense of it. Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost
progressed toward to the gate of hell misleading the innocent man into
eating the forbidden fruit and the result is the fall of man and the paradise
lost! It’s the blasphemy of religion as religion is not in any belief system,
but a transformation of heart from ignorance to light. Arieka’s interior
monologue affirms the truth succinctly:
But then-there had always been the suspect and doubtful about the
oracle even in the earliest recorded days. Those ancient hexameters-if
the truth was to be told-were not really very good. As prophesy they
were double tongued, there was no doubt about that. Either the god
would have his rollicking laughter, ‘the fall of a house’, or so subtle
an interpretation that it might catch anyone. All that was agreed. No
one expected the oracle to be anything else but riddling, and if you
consulted it you took your chance that you could understand the real
meaning of what the god said (DT101).
206 The Spire is more an imaginative analogy of the mind than mere
architectural detail as how does it function amid all binaries. Jocelin begins
as a grown up child. His experiences in the course of building force him to
grow up, though the delusion of his certainties ultimately destroys him. In
the death bed he is certain of nothing yet, he gains a visionary insight into
the nature of things. A magnificent balance is made between the physical
development of the spire and the spiritual development of Joceline’s mind.
The vision of the book is true in both its literal and spiritual sense. The
cathedral as a bible in stone, the spire is the Apocalypse; but it is also a
human body and the spire its erect phallus.
The central symbol, then, is the spire itself. It lends to itself to
multiple interpretations. It is in one hand the ‘diagram of prayer’ crowing it
heaven words; and on the other hand a symbol of sexual energy, phallus.
The phallic aspects works through Joceline’s mind subconsciously which
can be at best be interpreted in Freudian terms. The conventional symbol is
integrated into Joceline’s experience so that one simple, straight forward
message can never be final. It is always possible to show that alternative
interpretations are as viable. The alternative ‘messages’ of the spire exists in
tension, so that the problems posed by human existence admit of no simple
solution as man is bounded in finitude and tossed between faith and reason.
The spire is a universal order and a concept of unity. It is also a club, “a
stone hammer … waiting to strike”, an upward rushing towards the sky, ‘a
silent cry’; it is a slim girl as a symbol of creation, and it breaks ‘all the way
to infinity…’ The spire that bends but does not fall is also a morally
ambiguous structure. It emphasizes man’s vulnerability and involvement
with evil and his final regeneration into goodness through suffering.
The spire is built on both good and evil, faith and pride, and
fall and regeneration. The central message is that man’s is free to choose
207 good or evil. When the good is eclipsed man falls to degrading heights and
suffers, but suffering leads to self-knowledge. The construction of the spire
begins with ill–begotten money, hellish pit and human cellarage; at times it
shakes and creaks with a threat of fall yet, it touches the perfection of
heaven. Thus it is a structure of multiple ramifications – a complex image
that suggests human aspirations that of physical, emotional and spiritual
levels all at once.
The metaphor of spire is an embodiment of human nature from its
infancy to maturity. It is an art that grows from medieval to the modern. The
slow and gradual evolution of the spire vis–a–vis Joceline’s consciousness
is symbolic of mankind’s primitive to modern state in which progress is
achieved though not without fall. Professor Subba Rao observes in this
context that: “Jocelin’s quest for a pattern is Golding’s own quest for a
suitable objective correlative to embody ‘his sense of transcendent evil and
good’. It successfully culminates in the spire/ Apple tree image” (83). In the
ultimate analysis, the novel on its deeper level is a spiritual idea and its
realization in concrete terms. The novel shrieks and creaks in evil, shades a
silent cry for the loss of innocence and finally triumphs in goodness and
innocence. Jocelin suggests his life time experience by analogy. His dying
attempts, indeed, is to characterize the spire as the Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our
woe, but which also redeemed man form his evil. “Jocelin tastes the
bitterness of knowledge of evil in himself and all around him but succeeds
in making incarnate his glorious vision of man’s hopes” (Boyd: 86). His
vision is transcendental but arises from the physical world particularly from
the similes of the king-fisher and apple tree.
The conflicts through out, the personal dimension of guilt and
knowledge are finally subsumed to these pair of radiant images which
208 constitute natural yet magical beauty. Jocelin is in a ‘panic shot darkness’ on
the point of dying as death is inevitable for anyone on the earth. The
meaning of life is suggested by question: “what is terror and joy, how
should they be mixed, why are they the same, the flashing, the flying
through the panic shot darkness like a blue bird over water?” (SP. P. 223).
The meaning of life as well as the spire is enfolded in the image of kingfisher and the apple tree. Life is an admixture of terror and joy, good and
evil. That is the magic. They can never be fully defined or decoded.
Language is an ineffective medium for the communication of such
experience. Jocelin dies, “in the tied, flying like a bluebird, struggling,
shouting, screaming to leave behind the words of magic and
incomprehension – It’s like the apple tree!”. Jocelin realizes that life is a
miracle, rooted deeply in both innocence and guilt, in good and evil. They
are all the part of one unity. Jocelin is privileged enough by the making of
Golding to have this vision: “I was lucky to see it. No one else saw it”. (SP:
205).
Like most of the writers in the past and present, Golding is aware of
his social commitment. His protagonists undergo a tortuous journey through
life in the present world and face the tragic sense of human destiny. Man
faces the ‘end of innocence’, confusion between the physical and spiritual
world, and the traumas within himself in his quest for a pattern. Golding,
with his Aeschylean preoccupation with the human tragedy, shows both the
causes of evil that shoot up to engulf man in his created pattern, and the
ways out for salvation. He is not content with just projecting evil produced
by man as bee produces honey. He has a higher ambition to achieve: to
make man aware of self-knowledge he has lost, understand the real meaning
and purpose of human life and transcend to build a higher life and a better
world than the ones we have now.
209 Most of the changes in the social and cultural fields in the post-war
era are interrelated by some common causality. The ill-effects of growing
industrialization, technological advance, myth of progress, the decay of
religious control and a mad pursuit of materialistic value have combined to
offer man a comforting, but ultimately dangerous, protection. The most
awful among these has been the notion that science could be made a
substitute for religion. The consequences of this creed have proved to be
grave as:
Natural selection was used to justify racial persecution; the notion of
evolution became transformed into Wellsian social progressivism.
The smug religious superiority of the early Victorians gave place to
the smug scientific superiority of the early anthropologist. The
universe was as tidy and as comprehensible, for a few years, as the
Crystal Palace (Green: 77).
Man has grown away from reality by the spiritual blindness under the
eclipse of false illusions of smug scientific superiority. Golding, the
theurgist, turns on writing about English School boys, pre-historic man,
dead sailor or the freely falling Sammy only to focus on contemporary
human nature.
When there is widespread in difference in the spiritual, intellectual and
cultural atmosphere of the time, Golding is slightly out of steps with that of
his fellow writers in the 50's who moves beyond the parochial worlds of
rationalism to visionary fables of universal applicability. His fiction is
preoccupied with religious ideas. He is a “spiritual cosmologist who seeks
the relationship of man to the universe, and through the universe to God”
(Green79). The perennial themes recurring in his novels move around the
binarism of good and evil, innocence and guilt, blood and beauty and all are
mysteriously related as a dichotomy in a religious sense and the dividing
210 line of such
dichotomy ceases to exit against all encompassing nature of
the world in a larger sense, against the unity for "what men believe is a
function of what they are; and what they are is in part what has happened to
them" (FF: 161).
According to Grimes’ study of Jung, a primordial archetype contains a
union of opposites, combining both positive and negative attributes, and the
archetypal process is “one in which conflict of opposites results in the
achieving of a new reality” (18; 36). It’s not possible to create a “new
reality” in a theatrical frame work. Golding has succeeded in fusing the two.
Thus, innocence versus guilt and light versus darkness run parallel in
Golding’s fiction since his first publication of the Lord of the Flies, causing
endless speculation and debate over the years.
The clarion call of Ralph’s conch alone does not save the boys, not even
the signal fire they keep up. It is violence and bloodshed, death and
destruction that mirror their true nature. Similarly, Joceline’s spire does not
go up simply because of his spiritual power; as a master builder puts it, “a
spire goes down as far as it goes up” (39). It involves not just faith and
vision, but all the vaults, the cellarage of one’s mind, however dark, deep,
and rat-ridden it is. “There is no innocent work,” muses Jocelin on the point
of death, having been torn between heaven and hell, the divinely inspired
and the devilishly motivated, and eventually claiming to know nothing at all
(214-15). Joceline’s conviction, his power of mind has equaled the spiritual
power. Arieka moves between her worldly duties and her oracular
pronouncement under God’s guidance which is suggestive of human
condition that a bridge is a reality for every one amid the apparently binary
world of paradoxes.
How does a little tongue encompass what appear to be incompatible
entities? In his 1980 address on “Belief and Creativity,” Golding called
himself “a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist” (Moving Target 201),
211 which means he was a pessimist when considering the world from the
scientist’s perspective, but an optimist when the scope was expanded to
include the spiritual dimension. Golding alluded to this distinction in his
Nobel lecture (1983) before going on to quote himself from Free Fall,
whose protagonist Sammy Mountjoy decides that there is no bridge between
these two worlds. By the time he gave the lecture, Golding had realised that
there was a bridge, for both the ‘scientific intellect’ and the ‘religious
intellect’ and believed in miracles, be it inside a black hole or outside it. The
bridge had been thrust out from the side that least expected it, subatomic
physics and quantum theory having upset the extreme spirit/matter dualism
in Newton’s mechanistic worldview.
Pairs of complementary characters have their own roles to play to
realise the nature of their binary world in true perspectives. They are
namely, Ralph and Jack, Lok and Homo sapiens, Pincher Martin and
Nathaniel, Sammy Mountjoy and Beatrice Ifor, Jocelin and Roger, Matty
and Sophy, Talbot and Colley, Arieka and Ionides. Again they resemble the
pairs of opponents repelling as well as attracting each other in front of the
skene at the Great Dionysia. Arieka is destined to speak with a double
tongue, the tongue of two forks. Apollo, who she believes to be the supreme
God, also speaks the same way, “The god speaks with a double tongue
which he inherited from the huge snake he killed at Delphi (8). Arieka
understood the meaning of two- forked tongue: one that is communicable
with physical body and the other through divine perception, not through
senses. She affirms: “I myself have worked out what was meant by the other
fork of the tongue when the Pythia cried out ‘Fire, fire, fire!’ For that year in
which we took over Delphi was also the year in which the God Alexander
the Great was born” (8).
What she worked out, perhaps, is the secret of creation itself as Golding
has used the symbol of fire and void in almost all his novels with flexible
212 meaning that could be metaphors functioning as a bridge between his
apparently conflicting worlds. Fire combined with the primordial elements
becomes animated bodies and considered as the essence of all souls. Since
terrestrial fire is the representative of celestial fire, a phase of cosmic
consciousness and Deity is often spoken of as the cosmic fire of
consciousness. Pythia must have cried for cosmic consciousness reflecting
itself as finite consciousness, invisibility into visibility and infinite into
finite, for the God Alexander the Great was born and the history of the earth
began as Delphi is the centre of the earth.
Arieka has to speak through forked tongue for uttering both the
languages: physical and metaphysical. But the metaphysical is too subtle,
sometimes evasive, to be perceptible by all. Hence, there’s really no mutual
antagonism, no disentangling of the two forks of the tongue and not linked
up as thesis and antithesis. They are complementary and we end up with
multiple possibilities of interpretation. On the other hand Ionides as a
skeptic finds the Escape Clause: “There was always something in the
answer which could be interpreted in different ways… toning down the
positive and implying an alternative” (126). He is completely riddled by the
oracle and uses it to his convenience.
The moment Arieka sits on the oracular seat in the grotto she enters the
spiritual world. She comes to believe, “There was something connected with
the hidden centre of existence that lay there and sometimes spoke” (99).
Ionides, at this stage, began to understand the mystery of God and his
supernatural power following the oracular power of Arieka what he
jealously taunted her that she has to live on two levels, to mediate between
the physical universe and the spiritual cosmos (84; 70). But Arieka is
unmindful of any petty things as where Ionides lost, she found it.
213 The duality of Arieka and Ionides may be seen in one sense as the artist
and the interpreter. They go on like an extended co-operation between the
novelist and the reader. Ionides interprets the oracle of Arieka though they
work together in interpreting the world, the double vision. Jeng comments,
“They may approach the gods through different avenues and for utterly
divergent goals, yet they have contributed to each other’s understanding of
the universe, cosmos, whatever you call it, and ultimately of themselves as
if in a mirror, if not in a double mirror”.
When paradoxes exist in the binary world and the protagonists are
engaged in their struggle in seeking a pattern in pattern less world, a few
extraordinary figures always remain doubtless about their situation in the
world. Simon faces the Lord of the Flies quite convincingly conveying the
kernel of the fiction that the beast is within all of us; Lok in The Inheritors
faces extinction so calmly, yet leaves the trace of innocence; Jocelin
provides his vision of the apple tree, the tree of knowledge and also the
diagram of prayer; Matty transforms into another Simon, truly a saint; and
Arieka whose consciousness spans both worlds; realises the mystic
experiences through her journey of double tongue, double vision and doubly
doubled key .
Arieka could look through the pattern of this world, and then goes
beyond it with her double tongue, double vision. She forms the bridge
between the rational and the spiritual world as a compromise with each
other. Her going beyond is her realization of the curiously entangled
relationship of the universe and the cosmos. In the Lord of the Flies, there
has always been a complex, dark, and implicit suggestion of the “non-dual
state” in which binary opposites coexist and interpenetrate. The same truth
Vivekananda left to the world before two great wars:
214 In the universe of thought we find unity. Beyond all the motion,
energy, beyond the gross and subtle aspects of matter there is one.
Modern physics have demonstrated that the sum total of energies in the
universe is the same throughout. The sum total of energies exists in two
forms. It becomes potential, toned down, and calmed, and next it comes
out manifested as all these various forces; again it goes back to quiet
state, and again it manifests. Thus it goes on evolving and involving
through eternity (1:152).
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Wheatsheaf, 1990.Print.
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Oxford University Press, 1955.Print.
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CONCLUSION
217 The novelist is preoccupied with what is permanent in man's nature
around basic dialectical conflicts between the rational and the irrational
elements in man’s nature, between good and evil, and between the rational
and the spiritual world. Pairs of complementary characters have their own
roles to play to realise the nature of their binary world in true perspectives.
Paradoxes exist in the binary world and the protagonists are engaged in their
struggle in seeking a pattern in a pattern less world.
Golding has moved beyond any fixed categories amid binaries.
Arieka in Double Tongue has to speak or is rather destined to speak, through
forked tongue for uttering both the languages: physical and metaphysical.
But her going beyond the binary world is her realisation of the curiously
entangled relationship of the universe and the cosmos, between the rational
and the spiritual world as a compromise and looks for how human being is
rooted to the cosmic situation. It is a kind of religious exploration
embodying the primordial pattern of human experience. Golding has shown
how the adult world in the guise of the small boys in the Lord of the Flies
has lost faith in human values, and regressed to barbarism.
The war and the modern myth of progress have pushed man to
existential dilemma, absurdity of life, boredom and untold misery. The
irrational belief in science and the holocaust have shattered his faith, and
dehumanized his personality exhibiting essential human depravity. The
nameless island of the boys’ world is also isolated and the war of the boys’
world is the miniature form of the adult World War. The patterns of human
behaviour in such isolated, war ravaged condition is unfolded to create a
panoptic vision in which man can watch closely and be watched as to the
full expression to the modern world, and precisely the nature of man. The
spiritual cosmologist wanted to sustain the world in its prime innocence; in
218 its original purity amid the chaos of existence since patternlessness and
differentiation are universal realities.
Golding has explored the two counter posed worlds of human
awareness: the material world of science and reason and the metaphysical
world of God and faith. This universal conflict is subsumed in the psyche of
Sammy Mount joy who is shaken in his bones with the perennial agony of
finding a bridge, a pattern of permanent human existence. He is suspended
in statistical probabilities between the spiritual and rational world and
concludes that both the worlds are real. There is no bridge. But Sammy's
conclusion is not the conclusion of the book. In his brooding over different
episodes in his life he theologizes on a grand subject - the subject being not
the fall but a commentary upon it; and that answers for the ontological
search that human predicament is a reality due to lack of stability and
permanence in human personality.
In the Lord of the Flies, the Inheritors and the Pincher Martin,
Golding raises important questions about free will versus determinism and
about the nature of fallen man; while the Free Fall is a self-conscious quest
by its narrator about his fall from innocence. Similarly Jocelin in The Spire
is a fallen man obsessed with raising a spire above his cathedral. He reveals
the chaos man encounters within himself in his quest for a pattern. All the
protagonists in a Golding novel like Ralph, Martin, and Sammy are patternseekers but the cost involved is more appalling. As the building of the Spire
progresses, Jocelin pays the appalling personal price and the price he inflicts
upon the innocent lives. The spire is built on human corruption and evil.
Jocelin both achieves in his desire and fails in it. He builds an awe-inspiring
spire, but he is also forced to experience its maiming. The heavenly glory of
the spire is contrasted with his uncontrolled recognition of the hot,
219 distracting force of the phallus. He constantly struggles between the world
of his vision and faith and the world of reason.
The central concern of the Lord of the Flies is the conflict between
two competing impulses that exist within all human beings: the instinct to
live by rules against the instinct to gratify one’s immediate desires, act
violently to obtain supremacy over others, and enforce one’s will. This
conflict might be expressed in a number of ways: civilization vs. savagery,
order vs. chaos, reason vs. impulse, law vs. anarchy, or the broader heading
of good vs. evil.
The Free Fall is a classic case of Sammy’s ontological search
presented through the shifting time–pattern. Sammy wants to understand
and be understood about what has gone wrong and the way out for that. The
theurgist has theologized Sammy’s quest through continuous comment to
vouch for the truth that he is in search of. He searches his repertoire of
memories like a pendulum moving between past and present. He finds the
existence of spirit in ordinary world and his whole endeavour is to make a
fusion. Easter reveals in ordinary life, and he also finds how man’s soul,
having decayed, again resurrects through repentance. He has himself
experienced suffering in a womb like cell that revives him, and has known
his own transfiguration through Pentecostal fire. The symbolism here
reflects what happens to a man when he is touched by the spirit. Sammy’s
revelation expresses the whole human life of experience in which the good
and the evil follows simultaneously. His knowledge of his being does not
satisfy him. He is by constitution, the irrational and incoherent. He is
haunted by his lost freedom. Even through he knows of his being, he is
unable to escape the contradictions of his Being and Becoming.
Gestapo psychologist tortures Sammy mentally in the horror of a dark
locked cell. He recalls that an unnamable, unfathomable and invisible
220 darkness surrounds him. The prison camp is the re-enactment of Pincher’s
world as a panopticon structure for them to find meaning of life. Sammy
like Pincher is scared of darkness. In both the cases, it is related to
adolescent terrors. Sammy experienced the terror of darkness, for the first
time, in the rector under Watswatt. It is a primal fear, man’s age–old terror
in the face of primordial chaos. The terror felt deep down within his being,
he realises that it is a step by step process by which he must discover the
dreadful truth or the secret of the torture chamber. Physical darkness in the
cell leads to a psychic terror. The darkness is fathomed as he sees at the
center of the cell a mutilated penis symbolic of the gross sexuality at the
center of his being. It shows that the god he serves is his own sexual
appetite. The sexual organ is cut off, isolated from the rest of the living
creatures; it is no longer a part of a whole human being. This again shows
another aspect of the world with walls and isolations. This abyss of
deprivation and darkness is Sammy’s world in its stark truth: Sammy creates
the horror of his own hell.
The object of his horrified imagination, the shape at the heart of his
being is made clear by Dr. Halde who otherwise stands as good out of his
profession. He is, in the average perception, rouge or a Satan who inflicts
mental injuries. But he is also a doctor; he does seem to effect a partial cure
of Sammy, who emerged out of prison camp to find a world transformed
from sordidness and ugliness to the most radiant beauty. He gains an insight
into the nature of new world outside and the nature of dead thing inside.
Now the protagonist’s confession can been seen in the perspective with the
apocalyptic language with what the book began. About his new vision,
Professor Subba Rao comments: “Paradoxically enough, the physical
darkness lead him to light, but the light shows up the darkness within” (63).
Sammy gains the Wordsworthian vision of celestial glory and a poignant
awareness of natural depravity which is the panoptic vision for one and all
221 in the world. Mountjoy turns into biblical Samuel and perceives the qualities
of king ship. Paradoxically, he finds these qualities in all men and is able to
see the connection between the Kings of Egypt and humanity at large. He
becomes conscious of the responsibilities of kingship and his choice for
king is all men, a prophecy burdensome, but indisputably valid.
The interlocking story of Matty and Sophy in Darkness Visible opens
with a fire-storm in London during the blitz that speaks of an apocalypse
during World War–II. It is set in a specific time between 40s and 70s
England to present contemporary moral disintegration. Matty bears two
sided face, one black as being burnt or inside is Matty and the outside is
Sophy. The fiction moves through double narratives as Matty’s face and life
move on binary plane. Matty suffers in his child hood, but continues his
prophetic quest. Sophy, for her sexual excesses and criminal behaviour
forms the antithesis of Matty representing black magic. Sophy must come to
terms with her spiritual counter part who is sent on an exploratory journey
to come to a full circle to his saintliness via the failure in human love. Matty
is finally spiritualised at the hands of the fake Aborigine in an unnatural
scene of death and vision, as Palfreyman is born in death and Matty is born
to his spiritual vision. The final phase of his life is marked by absolute
detachment and suffers like that of Simon as a holy fool. The binary
opposition of this pair is akin to the Double Tongue but in both the cases
they fused into one divine purpose.
Matty’s ontological search is built around the binary structures of the
fiction which is justified by Weeks as well:
Sophy’s book is apparently the opposite of Matty’s, but follows the
same process, from
a kind of
seeing to scurrying to vision. . . . He may be
idiot, but is loving, sacrificing, faithful, saintly. She is
highly intelligent, but cynical, nihilist, sadistic, deadly. After
222 loveless and traumatic
childhoods both long to be accepted but are
rejected again and again. Both know themselves dual (the two sides
of Matty’s face; “inside” and
“outside” Sophy) and aware
childhood of forces beyond them acting through them.
“seers,” forced themselves and forcing us
nature and working of
Both
to see deeper
things. And as soon as we
recall the significant moments of the two stories we
from
are
into
the
attempt
to
detect
how remarkably they are parallel (283-284).
Thus, the ontological search is communicated as panoptic vision
around binary oppositions in the fiction in which Golding stands as a
successful theurgist. The Spire too represents Jocelin’s ontological search
leading towards God but in building it he moves away from ordinary human
concerns, yet discovers the knowledge of the truth of things and of our own
nature through the symbolic meaning. He still lays faith in God. He believes
in the ability of the crucified Christ to transfigure his Church and make it
prevail. The driving of the Holy Nail enacts his faith so that the second Tree
redeems the first. Again, the tree of the Spire works through binary
opposition bringing about the tragic fall of both Roger and Jocelin while
dragging them through stinking pit and corruption.
Jocelin sinks into the pit of sin when the spire has taken a complete
shape is only to rise to a new truth that corruption and beauty are
indistinguishable. Golding never allows the reader to settle into a view as
the vision of corruption gives way to a new insight, a new look showing the
reality of spiritual aspirations. His spire creaks and bends; he falls, but his
will soars high. He imitates ‘God’s Folly’, sacrifices himself but then falls
to rise to a tragic stature. The moment of his fall is also the moment of his
regeneration. At the moment of his search for knowledge he accepts
humbly: “… I don’t really know myself” (SP: 193). With his newly
223 acquired vision, all arrogance and pride melted; he goes to Father Anselm
for forgiveness against his spiteful venom.
Love and forgiveness in him is more genuinely Christ like. He goes
among the lowly tradesmen, shares their work and becomes a jack–of–all
trade as he realizes their pain and suffering. As he experiences the reality of
human love, he babbles foolish things about an apple tree in the gutter. The
symbol of apple tree and king fisher flashed before Joceline’s eye on his
way to Roger which establishes them as part of his universe. Having
realised his unworthiness he removes his priestly robe for he understands
now the sanctity of individual relationships. His act of contrition is much
similar to Sammy’s resurrection in the dark prison cell. Having began in
pride he ends in love and penance as he considers him as a dead-dog
gargoyle through which no clear water could run. The beauty of the world
which had flashed before him is now fused with the goodness of man. In the
microcosm of the cathedral world Jocelin sacrifices himself on the great tree
of the spire and re-enacts Pangal’s sacrifice to Pagan gods. The mob whose
identity is obscure, ridicules Jocelin to the state of a scape- goat.
Indian wisdom of what Krishna suggested to Arjuna echoed in
Golding: “It is we fools who have made it evil. We manufacture our own
ghosts and demons, and then we can not get rid of them. We put our hands
before our eyes and cry: ‘somebody gives us light’. Fools! Take your hands
from your eyes!”(Qtd. inVivekananda 1:476).The same thing happened to
all the characters in Golding’s fiction who just made fool of themselves and
cried for help and herein les the power of Theurgy that leads us from
ignorance to knowledge and from innocence to experience.
Golding’s life and message have been very bold to the world. He has
seen many wonderful institutions, customs, people, and religion around the
world. What he found in his sincere study and reflected in fiction is that
224 depravity is the essence of our being. But that should not just stop us agape!
He delved deeper and deeper only to find out that every where the good and
evil are woven finely and they are wonderfully balanced. Above all, he
found the glorious human soul that echoes one common voice of humanity,
one common struggle for freedom from all bondage. The paths of each
character are at variance, but all leading to one common shore which is
spiritual awakening from material plane. The search for spirituality is a
common impulse but evades the perception of a common human being with
coarse sensibility. Only a master can gauge such impulse and instincts.
His technique of deferring and deferring of a fact through indirections
and flash backs stimulate the reader’s mind, strikes the intellectual plane to
discover the higher truth, even truths that transcends the senses and reason
for reason itself is slave to senses. Higher truths are always beyond the
sense plane and inexplicable. They are to be realised. No words can express
this. Some such truths are realised by Sammy, Simon, Jocelin and Arieka.
Martin, the dead sailor, too realised it the moment he purged his egotistic
soul through suffering. Till he held on to the relative plane of ego and senseworld surrounding his own putrid corpse, the flash of the truth remained
obscured. He struggled incessantly to preserve his decomposed body
through his false ego but surrendered to spirituality or spirituality flashed
upon him as his rewards for suffering that threw off the garments of
brutality for the celebration of immortality. All delusion shrouded him in the
prime of his youth, in the height of his power and glory.
Like Martin, the author himself as captain of a ship enjoyed such
power and glory; the Great War brought the bleak side of humanity very
closer to him. Afterwards, as a teacher and a noble citizen, his huge and
varied receptacle of experience renewed sharp interaction of post war
currents from different parts of the world. He also found the bright and
225 prosperous sides in the human endeavour for a lasting peace and solution.
All pleasures and pain, wealth and poverty, strengths and weakness, smile
and tears, good and evil for him, melted into one eternal rhythm, each
individual notes representing the search of unity, search for meaning of life.
His influence and thought like the gentle dew bear upon every sensible
person in the world, a sense of search after the truth. His lifelong effort for
search after the truth is now bringing into bloom the fairest flower on this
planet of spirituality, of monism, of a balance of materialism and
spiritualism. That material has to be accepted only to reach the higher plane
of spirituality. Herein the ‘Vedantic’ dualism and non-dualism stand
justified in its respective plane. One leads to the other.
The world for Golding has ever been the same. All the binaries are to
balance each other, accepting the sum total intact. Here, one language is
translated into another or one kind of evil is giving way to another kind of
evil; so does the good. A set of thinkers replace another and the world
moves on, or else, Marxism was a kind of practical religion for almost one
third of the world but it crumbled to give way to another. No ‘cracy’, no
‘ism’, no dictates have ever been the final say. It is only one set replacing
another set according to the changed circumstances but the total result has
curiously been the constant. There has never been any magical wand to any
permanence. Golding realised it well that all the isms have their own say
and then they have to exhaust to give way to another as he was well versed
in the Gita and all the Indian scriptures. He knew that nothing can satisfy
humanity permanently. So long the world exists, and it would exist as such,
there will be all such divisions, distinctions, suffering and people would rise
to the occasion. But the centre or the ultimate is elusive and unknown for all
and this is the practicality for him that one has to go on and on toward more
concrete and never being able to explicate in concrete term or in finite form
as Simon set the example.
226 Arieka, in the Double Tongue, has not gone for any ontological
questions. She moved beyond the binary world which is reflected in her
monologue that abounds questions on the meaning of all binaries and its
answers while encountering Ionides. Ionides was a confused philistine with
his ageing approach to the mystery and came to believe in its power only
later. Otherwise, mystic power was a ‘paradox’ and ‘an escape clause’ for
him. But Arieka confirms that such doubt and apprehension is also a product
of the same void and the power of hexameter, both merging into one.
Interpretation may be made in multiple ways as to confound others when
one has not understood it or be convinced concretely and remain calm and
composed the way the author himself remained silent over the wrong edition
of the Lord of the Flies, but he knew certain that the world would come to
know its essence sooner or later. When Ionides questions whether Delphi
can exist without the oracle, the answer came straight and rock solid that the
oracle was present before writing was invented. So, existence is eternal and
unchanged without any beginning or end. What we see as change is on
apparent the level.
Perseus in the last chapter of the Double Tongue handed over a key
shaped as double axe to Arieka. This is confirmation of double standard of
people and also the duality of the world. Binaries are phenomena the world
is made up of. At the close of the novel Golding has shown a complete
communion, a kind of flux of Pythia with the supreme god Apollo. The
description might seem to be bizarre to one who has not experienced any
mysticism or spiritual power but the delineation has its own power of
emitting enough strength out of Pythia’s voice as when she enters the last
niche of the holiest of all, the Holly Apollo, she finds herself as the little
barbarian afraid of the dark, yet herself subsumed into darkness. Here,
comes the realisation of ‘monism’ beyond all binaries.
227 Golding in all his fiction shifts or alters his point of view at the end
unsettling the readers and reverses known stories or myths. He shifts from
the protagonist to an indifferent and distant observer. These reversals focus
on Golding's panoptic vision and are meant to persuade the reader to see
how man should behave, not simply how he does behave. Golding himself
was a psychologist and philosopher. He had considerable experience of
teaching philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth’s School. He had a dislike for
Marx, Freud or Darwin for their reductionism.
Golding creates a universal language which attempts to synthesize the
essences of all religions into an understandable set of core symbols that
anyone can understand. The ‘void’ is one of the prominent symbols Golding
has used time and again. The inter relation of all things becomes perceived
by the theurgist. Ultimately, the mystic penetrates the veil of forms and
emerges into the unified field of pure consciousness, the essence of God,
where all differentiation disappears. Void, for Arieka, was the door of death
and the whole play of Maya as it was made clear from her realisation that
death was an escape and refuge. The play of life is to be accepted. Arieka or
Golding as theurgist has demarcated between the function of the mundane
and the divine. Ordinary people have to face the life, learn the lesson
through the path of karma. Theurgy as a practice has lasted ever since as so
many philosophers of diverse eras across religious and cultural paradigms
have established it as neutral to any isms or particular belief system while
declaring its unfragmented
truth and realisation.
Arieka’s mystic
experience of the unity of the world is vividly expressed in her own words
that she missed the gods and was not just ashamed, but stricken down with
grief, and eventually she got to the level .This clearly shows that she came
to the level of realising that all the people are but her own reflection and the
same animating power works through the visible and non visible universe
without any discrimination of name or form.
228 At the holy seat Arieka has termed God’s visitation as rape. The word
‘rape’ has a strongest negative denotation but the author has juggled with
the word to heighten our quest of it. Here, it is other way round as the
moment of god’s visitation is oblivion of this rational, phenomenal world
what Golding has used metaphorically as void, for Arieka continues to feel
the rollicking laughter during God’s visitations. She feels brave as she is
now a transformed personality but the moment she is in this world of sense
plane, she is beset with the ego of ‘I’, the limit of mortality and transience
what necessitates her to be in all doubts and limits and hence, the moment
she is off from the god, she shouts out with her own voice, not god’s. Arieka
hears the ‘rollicking laughter’ or the god’s voice what is not meant for
ordinary people. Ionides, on the other hand, finds the ‘escape clause’ of
misinterpreting things. Both, Ionides and Arieka, form a perfect thesis and
anti thesis. Ionides is a homosexual person; Arieka is sexually neutral. He
married her for making the Pythia for Delphi for her reputed power of
healing even as a little barbarian. She has kept her unflinching faith in god
even when the gods turned their back and she witnessed the void.
Golding as a man in search of a cosmological truth has proclaimed
that it is the ultimate reality that counts against any labels. This reality as
ontological truth of life is communicated through the fables and myths of
his novel. The writer has taken upon himself the task of theurgist to create
this tool of myth through which the imaginative substance of religious belief
has been expressed, communicated and enhanced while creating a
permanent visibility of a unique panoptic model that his fiction stands for.
His myth is a story at which we can do nothing but wonder which involves
the roots of our being and reverberates there. The truth in the novels is
accessible and expressed through symbols and metaphors.
229 Myth is not something which is extrinsic to the nature of man but part
of the essence of his being. Golding’s novels present a faithful reflection of
the complicities of life in its actual experience. His myths provide the
metaphorical answer to the fundamental questions, “what is the nature of
good and evil? What is man’s origin and destiny? The mythic element in the
first novel is intricately connected with what Golding has called the terrible
disease of being human. He has been a dispassionate observer of the society
at large to remind the post–war generations of man’s mythic inheritance
through the Lord of the Flies which shows how we all tend to ignore the
primitive side of man’s nature.
The characters and plots are skillfully manipulated and polished well
with his spirit of enquiry to fit into his design. For instance, characters like
Sammy, Simon, Jocelin, Martin, and Arieka etc. show different struggles in
their lives and how they come to truth at last through their tortuous journey
speaking the one idea of unity out of their varied circumstances. All the
fiction, taken together, speaks of on a central issue and that also reflects
upon the thought process of the author himself. His is a heart that had the
expanse of ever widening horizon to understand the oneness, the unity that
brought fruition through the works to leave behind for the mass as the
repertoire of the gymnasium of our world to get the exercises as and when
necessary to correct our soul and mind.
Golding’s mythic imagination is his power of Theurgy and presented
as a panoptic model through the plot and structure. The characters are true
to life and reveal the mystery of life. In The Inheritors Golding reveals the
nature of man by imagining his origins; in the Pincher Martin he shows his
end. Pincher is an alter ego whose struggle for survival on the imagined
rock in the Atlantic is shown through flashbacks as mythic representation of
the sum total of his actions. Pincher’s attempt to hold on in a watery
230 purgatory with a fragmented identity is a penetrating comment on
corruption of consciousness. Ultimately his identity is annihilated; he lapses
into death he repudiated, which speaks for itself as an emerging pattern in
the face of patternlessness.
The theurgist in the Free Fall shows the Fall of Man. Sammy, the
pattern–seeker, interrogates his own experience in search of the crucial
moment of his life. He is involved from the very outset to explain a pattern
of life and continuously faces the collision of differing patterns. Sammy’s
conclusion that the two worlds have no bridge is itself a pattern. Golding’s
exploration through his alter ego of a possible bridge is eventually separated
from the protagonist’s quest. The author has indicated the direction of a
possible bridge by the metaphor of the Sphinx’s riddle at the final page,
upsetting Sammy’s certainties. Golding has created a satisfactorily fictive
and historical world to fit Sammy in which all the patterns seem too limited
to explain life.
The panoptic vision of the Spire reveals the nature of the riddle of life
avoiding any reductiveness. Here, Jocelin is less self–conscious protagonist
than Sammy. The story in a particular chronological order constantly turns
back on itself in search of its own significance. Jocelin does not talk about
any pattern but the building of the spire through a sequence of physical
events works in a way as an inquiry into the meaning of Jocelin’s life. The
building of the spire as a historical reality of the middle ages is presented in
a fictive world in a way to reveal archetypal truth in the process of its
gradual unfolding. A new lesson is learnt at each height with new problems
of both physical and metaphysical. The Spire is built in faith, in heavy
stone and in sin. The diversity of explanation around the metaphor of the
spire shows that a reductive explanation is impossible. The phallus -turned
spire is more about its mythic revelation of vision and its cost. The spire
231 stands as a symbol of unity in which both good and evil stand as a part of a
pattern which could never be comprehended. It is like magic and
incomprehension.
Ontologist-turned myth–maker is not a debater of doctrines. He is a
builder of a mythopoeia which is permanent and relevant to man in all ages.
Golding’s imagination accompanies an intense awareness of the physical
world, in a constant flux with the metaphysical world and in the process he
idealises self knowledge as a sign of holiness. He is committed to look at the
root of the disease instead of its symptoms. Therefore, the patterned actions
of Golding’s characters are akin to the conception of man and the shape of
the universe. In the Double Tongue the author has shared his experience of a
‘memory before memory’ through Pythia about the state of being in the
realm of spirit- no shape, no form - only a kind of vibration in timeless
presence as Arieka felt the moment of her birth as blazing light and warmth,
undifferentiated and experiencing themselves.
Both Ionides and Arieka belong to two different worlds. When
Ionides picked up the art of deception, the art of double-dealing, Golding
was perturbed if this is the price of our growth. Ionides, of late, understood
the power of Theurgy and spoke candidly of his muddle-headedness that he
lives, unlike Arieka, only on the mundane level, but Arieka could fuse the
two, as she declares that she lives only on one level. Arieka realises the
secret of creation at a moment when she fuses her physical and
metaphysical presence at the grotto, close to the curtain of Apollo and feels
that her breathing is stirring an unnamed monster. The divine and the
mundane are but the reflection of one Apollo and He is the driving force
functioning through both the mortal and the immortal.
The root problem of the world that the author has shown is not the
primordial chaos but the limited vision, the ignorance with which we
232 journey through it and make a hell of it. The world is neither good nor evil;
it is a mixture of both. In Golding’s world none remains in isolation.
Wherever there is evil, good follows even without our perception. Golding’s
conviction is that guilt is rooted in ourselves which renders rational moral
purpose of little avail. Guilt and its responsibility connect the little boy
Sammy, who was clear as ‘spring water’ and turned into a ‘stagnant pool’
later. Sammy speaks for himself with a degree of self- Justification as well
as guilty self-reproach. Sammy is Golding’s perennial Everyman with a
panoptic vision who realises that people are the walls of our room, not
philosophies. He gains an insight into the nature of the new world outside
and the nature of the dead thing inside. The anti thesis or the binary
opposites with which the book opens becomes clear in his confession. It
makes clear that the paradoxes are inherent human predicament. Man’s
spiritual and rational worlds are incompatible. Sammy realises that salvation
is not to be found in any external system, but in the discovery of the vital
morality. Guilt is inevitable and this guilt is the condition of transcendence.
The climax of the moral is Sammy’s responsibility for Beatrice’s cataleptic
degradation.
Golding’s essential concern is with Being, not Becoming. Arieka or
Simon is examples of being. Oedipal tragedy shows us what there is to be
seen has always been there, but we try to escape seeing it. Oedipus also
carries with himself a central darkness, determined and unchangeable. His
journey through the unrealities of the world has to give way to the eternal
moment of the revelation of his Being. Sammy is sure of his Being, but
equally sure that it lies within the human will to choose and change one’s
whole direction. A language of Becoming is asserted against the static
character of his Being. Sammy searches for an explanation of what he
already knows. He reviews his past to discover the bridge between his being
and becoming. Golding’s concept of good and evil is close to Vedanta
233 philosophy as the dualistic conception of them are only the diverse
manifestations of the same fact, one time appearing as bad , and at another
time as good. The difference does not exist in kind, but only in degree. Man
is born to seek after this truth as a free soul and we continue to be eluded in
the dualistic pattern of good and evil till we cross the finitude of our
consciousness.
Sammy’s world and self are torn with conflicts: body and spirit,
science and religion, Paradise Hill and the Mount of Venus. He finds no
bridge between the sensual and the spiritual at the end. But it is only after
the transfiguring experience in his prison cell that Sammy and the reader
find an answer in the Sphinx riddle. It answers the question raised in the
Pincher Martin how one should look at man. Both Pincher and Sammy
show the one and the same truth: “so long as one cannot free oneself of the
‘I’, of the burden of the finite consciousness, one continues to be guilty and
fall down” (Subba Rao: 66). Man continues to be flawed and guilt ridden
until he is purged of his ego, as Sammy is in the dark cell. Then he can
regain the wholeness, the unity of his being and see harmony in the cosmos.
Jocelin found this unity in the meeting of his spine with the spire. The
phallus turned spire, the diagram of highest prayer, emerges as a unity in
which none of the good and evil exists as a separate entity. They differ from
each other only in degree of intensity. Golding himself has stated that the
end of his novel is his beginning and the beginning is only of judgment of
good and evil.
The answer to the ontological question of what is man’s nature is not
straight and simple. The mutually opposed ideas or philosophies as binary
opposites are always in tension in Golding novels. Human existence itself is
a complex reality and Golding proves this by presenting his protagonists
face to face with conflicting ideas in a concrete situation. Hence, the process
234 of interpretation of Golding’s message depends on the situation in which
man is shown, and in fact is, an admixture of rational and irrational being.
He is not ruled purely by his reason or will. So, the larger statement about
good and evil is a matter of judgment and Golding in the Free Fall has
shown- not what but how- to see and judge the facts of life. Since Golding
establishes general truths in his fiction, he textures them densely and the
characters are three dimensional human beings representing as exemplars of
facets of man’s nature– innocent, wicked or guilty. Ralph, the new men
(Homo sapiens), Pincher, Sammy and Jocelin are all in the category of
guilty as distinguished from innocent and wicked. But the wicked creatures
are not left in the dead loss of hope. Through their symbolic death and
rebirth they emerge from darkness to absolute goodness. Sammy ‘emerges
from the cell with some portion of victory’ as in the cell he has made use of
man’s last recourse, prayer. Sammy’s cry in the cell for help is the sign of
his conversion. But we fail to notice such conversion as the doctor in the
prison camp could not understand it. He enables Sammy to reveal himself
but he is also a reducer. Golding struggles through Sammy to diagnose a
true, single vision out of Sammy’s double vision through cryptic opacity
only to avoid reductiveness in his answer. It is also his answer to Marx,
Darwin and Freud of the western world, who were themselves reductive,
and for whom the mystery of life can be apprehended by logic and reason
alone.
Golding celebrates mystery of life amid the binaries not by reason but
by harmonizing man and his universe; a harmony which is lost as man
acquires self–consciousness and alienation. Simon has an instinctive
relationship with the world. His sea–burial intimates a sense of quiet order,
a huge and universal perspective which includes everything. It was the
nature of Simon’s view to see things inclusively in both their heroic and sick
aspects. Nature also in its endless process accepts Simon with both the riot
235 and clamour of day and the calm, fragrant beauty of night. In Golding novel
heroism as well as sickness, good and evil are made explicit through various
symbols and metaphors: the totem of the Lord of the Flies, the corrupting
flesh of the parachutist and the vision of Simon’s sea–burial in the Lord of
the Flies; Pincher’s Promethean struggle for survival in Pincher Martin;
Sammy’s quest for a pattern and the purgatorial process in Free Fall; void
in Double Tongue and finally through the metaphorical structure around the
spire itself in The Spire are all rich in such metaphorical meaning. They all
form part of the whole; the unity and the binary world remain as a
dichotomy only in our finitude.
The novels of Golding carry the implication that man’s unique power
to reason and think carries with it his propensity toward pride, sin and guilt,
towards those qualities that cause him pain and misery. The dramatic writer
as theurgist with strong instincts of self–preservation is free from any
hysteria. He has broadened the panoptic vision by depicting man not as an
exotic or freakish creature, but as a physical being in a physical world, torn
between a primitive innocence and the intelligence of an evolving mind. All
scientific discoveries in biology, astronomy and psychology, our awareness
of our physical world are a necessary part of our evolving consciousness,
but the root of the disease of evil arises when we over–rate their importance
;whereas our real job is to show it ‘sub species aeternitates’.
He also observes that the critics of Aeschylian outlook think that they
have an easy answer to all the problems simply because they fail to look
further than the rash appearing on the skin. The world as such is neither
good nor evil. The perception is rooted in the human brain and in human
consciousness. The conch’s symbolic meaning depends on the state of the
children’s minds, not in the sound of the shell. Once power becomes more
real to Jack than the rules, the conch renders no meaningless. Piggy makes
236 the mistake of reducing the meaning of the shell at this point that shows the
moment of his greatest blindness and eventually he dies a pathetic death.
Evil exists, but not as a Beast. It is an external manifestation of what is
really inside and an emblematic and conceptual reduction are dangerous
manifestations of the Fall. Golding has shown this in the series of his
novels: the homo sapiens makes the prehistoric man the image of his own
evil; Pincher and Sammy recreate real people into the shapes of their own
lust; Jocelin’s phallic ambition destroys four human pillars until at the end
he realizes the complex truth.
The panoptic vision of human depravity and his fallen states as shown
by Golding are sometimes viewed as dystopian and pessimistic. When both
good and evil are exclusive human concepts, Golding has depicted more
evil than good, for he believes good can look after itself but evil is the
problem. For him, mankind offers at best a sorry sight and he undertakes the
grand task to denounce all weaknesses and ignorance to make the world
worth living. His pessimistic view of humanity’s imperfection and the
resultant Fall has not been claimed by Golding that he is saying something
original but something which has to be re-stated by each generation in its
own way and therefore, from this point of view, he is far from a pessimist.
The knowledge of evil and its validity alone can generate positive
possibilities. Not to know evil is, in a sense, to know nothing. Golding is
fascinated by the evidence that human consciousness is a biological asset
purchased at a price; the price is the knowledge of evil.
This evil emanates from the human mind, a product of its action upon
environment. Therefore, the novels investigate how the individual human
being is tossed and buffeted about throughout his/her existence by the ordeal
of consciousness. The protagonists undergo myriad experiences of great
complexity without any clear guide around which they could organise their
237 experiences. Golding sets the tone of his age by making valid
generalisations about the whole meaning of life and stands as a moralist in
an immoralist age. It is true that evil proceeds from within but it can not be
dispersed by another evil or intelligence. Hence, he idealised self–
knowledge as the only hope for humanity. He is a religious mystic, a
theurgist with ontological search ,for whom mankind is fiercely repellent,
and in whose eyes, only the saint or the ‘prelapsarian’ Simon, Lok,
Nathaniel, Arieka–can justify human existence. Lok, like Simon before him,
is a holy fool and a Christ figure, who is identified with the meek and takes
the sins and sorrows of man upon himself.
Simon’s view of ‘mankind’s essential illness’, as a panoptic vision
amid the antithetical forms like reason and faith, proves conclusively that
there is evil in all human being but it does not prove man is evil alone or
illness is the essence of man. Simon’s life and death offer hope in the
pervasive gloom of the island world. He is one good man capable of
imitating Christ’s redemptive example. Nathaniel in Pincher Martin and
Matty in Darkness Visible are also prophetic fools. Ralph strives to be fair
and decent. Jack, the most evil character in the book, provides more
effective form of government than Ralph’s to maintain order and provide
food for everyone. He also could not hunt initially because of the enormity
of the knife.
The case with the New Men suggests that making good involves
doing evil. The Homo sapiens achieve historical success with their
evolutionary knowledge of guilt. The very cry of despair that Tuami utters
suggests the growth of a new, more refined consciousness, one that could
not have come into existence without the knowledge of evil. The new
people’s advances involve destruction of a great art which Oa’s teeming
belly could never produce. The ‘new one’, the infant survivor of Lok’s
238 people, suggests that the world of binary opposites slide into one with the
possibility of reconciliation between innocence and guilt, good and evil. The
goodness of the new baby is likely to be introduced into human kind and
thus, we would be the inheritors of a new race with a new hope.
The Darkness Visible is primarily concerned with the act of ‘seeing’
and the novel implies that good and evil are based upon our perceptions.
Sophy is the true child of the modern evil world as she is attracted to the
darker passions of life, yet she is engaged in the same spiritual quest as
Matty. The binary opposition is seen to be illusory as the antithesis between
Sophy and Maty, both placed in the basic dialectic of good and evil, is
destroyed, for there existed one belief. Whether the world is malign or
benign depends upon the constitution of the perceiver’s psyche. Simon
views the island as beautiful, for Ralph the sea appears as divided and
enigmatic. Jack feels it as a place of hunting or to be hunted. Dr. Halde
effects a partial cure of Sammy and appears, inadvertently though, as
instruments of good. Jocelin as with Sammy falls to rise again. His irrational
faith, his big dare makes a journey towards heaven transcending all good
and evil. Thus, Golding solved the problem of expressing transcendent good
and evil more satisfactorily than any other living English novelist.
Golding’s works make his readers ‘see’. His characters are rarely
helpless victims of socio–economic forces beyond their control. They are in
each case an embodiment of a proposition about human nature, rather than
an individual. The world they live in is tragic; a world of man’s nature both
to inflict and endure suffering; and a world in which one must choose and
the wrong choice can be the Fall. The war time captain does weep over the
darkness of man’s heart and convey a sense of prophetic urgency, a sense
that evil in our time is burgeoning, is spiraling towards some awful end. In
the face of such pervasive gloom when the fowl brew is brim full, he brings
239 one redeeming moment by reawakening the Delphic Oracle
(know
yourself), the knowledge of good and evil and their ultimate reconciliation
with the unity, before the cup bubbles over.
Golding makes his realization of this world or the cosmos very daringly as a
saint or a scientist:
What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and
that if anything it has
been thrust out from the side which least
expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we
know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I
might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid
you to examine it. If
there was no beginning then infinite time
has already passed and we could never have got
to
the
moment
where we are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable
to
postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no
longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most
religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find
humanity
in
a
comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of
miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in
them outside it. Both,
in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus
quia absurdum est. Glory be to God in the
reductive pessimism from
highest. You will get no
me (Nobel lecture).
Golding’s mythic and allegorical universe, in which damnation and
salvation are still possible, is enough to save man from utter hopelessness
and to impart meaning and purpose of life. After all, his solitary light of
hope that shines over our bleak landscape emanates from the depth of his
being. The author has addressed the issue of double vision as the deepest
human problem due to the clash between the two worlds in which man
attempts to live simultaneously, the natural world and the man-made world.
240 Civilised man does not act only upon the rational guidance of his/her
intellectual ego nor is s/he driven blindly by the mere elemental forces of his
instinctual self. He has suggested that there is a third principle, which
combines the rational and irrational elements as a process of synthesis
between the two .The Double Tongue is an attempt to attain this mystic
height for Arieka or the Pythia. The two forks of the double tongue are in
relation to the doubly-doubled key which derives its shape from a symbol of
a Goddess. It may be argued that the doubly-doubled key helps Arieka, as it
was with Sammy, to confront with her own ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’ in the
world of binary. Arieka’s double vision is paralleled with Matty and Sophy
in the Darkness Visible. Ionides speaks with double tongue stealing Arieka’s
words and Sophy, the antithesis of Matty, is a debauched woman. Her inside
is in conflict with the outside. Matty’s face has a binary connotation; one
side is black being burnt during the London blitz which, otherwise, reflects
Sophy’s nature and the darkness of human heart. Arieka turns into
permanence and Matty a saint. Duality is a constant phenomenon among
them like the double- forked key; both help each other in realising their life,
yet so long life exists the duality is indispensible. Joceline too faces the
duality as the upward and downward thrust of the cathedral tower in The
Spire. Sammy searches ontologically if any bridge exists between the two
worlds.
The existence of or answer for any bridge is the central focus of
Golding’s fiction which moves around the ideographic structure in which
the two-narrative movements go simultaneously in each novel. The author’s
prophetic insight as a theurgist shines through all his works proceeding
along double narratives. Golding intends that the two perspectives are to be
complementary, not contradictory. It is the quality of great craftsmanship
that the readers are forced to accept, at least in the imaginative realm, the
paradoxes of existence, the synthesis of a dialectical world which the
241 fiction’s characters fail to perceive or struggles to shun away. The theurgist
ultimately cures this apparent grudge between two antithetical characters for
the readers in general to move forward.
Lord of the Flies is more than a clash between the conscious will and
the involuntary instincts. Ralph as Everyman follows both, and only by so
doing could he survive Piggy and surpass Jack in moral awareness. Matty,
on the other hand, shuttles back and forth between the physical and the
spiritual worlds, administering consolation to those with single visions and
even sacrificing himself for a child who will usher in a spiritual language.
Sammy enters the world of a higher order of language like Matty does. And
now double-tongued Arieka must live quintessentially on two levels at once,
mediating between the physical universe and the spiritual cosmos. This may
be why Ionides calls her the freest woman in Hellas, even in the whole
world, since she need not be bogged down by rational explanations.
All the characters have, in one way or the other, been subjected to a
double vision and the double vision has made distinction between spiritual
and natural language. Spiritual language is metaphorical in nature which is
beyond the bounds of mere connotation or denotation, while natural
language insists that it is a sign system objectifying the natural order. The
spiritual language is a matter of spirit, an encompassing language of love for
all. God’s love for humanity is reciprocated as human love for God. Simon
and Matty are such impeccable characters who loved their fellow beings for
no ulterior motive. It is love for love’s sake. Golding well understood the
concept of Maya or time-space-causation which cramps our vision and
hence, the natural language is founded on the subject-object split. Certainly,
it is a matter of perception of the protagonists in particular and the readers in
general to delve deep into spiritual language. Golding called the variation of
perception as ‘degree’ which was symbolised by the doubly-double key.
242 Human being is bound by theory of karma and entanglement in it makes us
shuttle between the physical and the spiritual world until we are refined like
Arieka or Simon to see through. Thus, Golding’s work may be termed as
religious mythopoeia as the writer contemplates the mystery of the cosmos
through his mythic universe. Then, it is the burden on the reader to
reciprocate the same at least at the imaginative level, who knows s/he too is
not far behind from such mystery, or else why on the earth Simon, Matty or
Golding survive!
Beyond the binary is beyond the world of Maya, beyond the world of
sense ego in human beings. Our consciousness itself is the root of our ego.
Pincher Martin best exemplifies this play of ego in human beings. Martin’s
ego was not purified and he held on to his dead body as if he is still
surviving and it might be the case of millions of Martins in this world who
continue to hold on the same line and finally, end up in the process to
remain locked in the phenomenal world ,the world of binary of which every
one contributes in one or the other way toward the great chain of being , the
infinity, the undifferentiated, the un-fragmented and probably we are born to
struggle to move toward the same goal reaching where we must cease to
exist as we seem to exist in others memory ,and so far we talk and write and
think , it is only under the limit of ego or Maya.
Ideographic structure with binary oppositions, as shown by the
author, has always existed in the world in different forms and nature. Two
antithetical forms -reason and faith have not only divided the psyche of the
characters in the fiction, it has also divided the East and the West, ever and
always, though wrongly, and this absurd separation began to wane after the
second World War whose germs were sowed before the two wars, might it
be counted from the days of the Parliament of Religions held in Chicago.
One of the important techniques used in Golding is a ‘coup de grace’ which
243 is a strong finishing stroke or a decisive way of ending something. The loan
phrase from French is used in all sorts of contexts. The specific structure of
a Golding fiction involves binaries at different levels, but the end of the plot
in all his fiction reverses the point of view and the expectations of the
readers. Towards the end of each fiction the reader moves from the
protagonist's points of view to another character's points of view on the
same situation. The two perspectives are connected, not as contradictory to
each other but to synthesize them into a third option for persuading the
readers into a world beyond the binary. In making such a contradictory
world, Golding creates a panopticon to see how the readers connect the
bridge between the apparently contradictory perspectives and while
accepting such paradoxes of existence as symptoms of the spiritual world,
they reconnect them to the ultimate destiny of man’s single existence amid
all such babble of life. Golding makes it clear that, it is the quality of
thought and not its object which determines its source and allows us to
decide whether or not it emanates from absolute truth. His panoptic vision
created through the characters and plots have invigorated our thought
process to stride beyond the limitations of the worlds.
Finally, Golding’s idea on ontology is that human being must
remain intransigent in the face of accepted beliefs and insist upon alternative
perspectives beneath the surface of contemporary clichés. Characters reflect
the embodiment of a type of larger human species while laying bare their
original nature. The author has broadened his Ontological search ,not by
delimiting it(deconstruction).His straight answer is that man’s rise to
consciousness is his fall, yet the solidarity of human race with a scope of
infinite variation is the plan of nature. Fusion of differentiations is the march
toward unity of existence. Unity is ever existent amid apparent binaries.
Characters display a movement from fragmentation of experience to
undifferentiated consciousness- ‘Existence to Essence’.
244 Golding’s Theurgy creates a vision through his characters that helps
drive away the evil curiously mixed in the fabric of life. He is the sorcerer.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest when contrasted with Golding characters, it is
observed that Ariel and Caliban as binary opposition have their counter
parts in the fiction of Golding. There are similarities and consistencies in
dramatis personae which underlie difference.
His panoptic vision has placed and induced people in a state of
conscious and permanent visibility. The root problem of the world is not the
primordial chaos but it is limited vision. Knowledge as power is exercised
continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way.
Characters are in each case an embodiment of a proposition about human
nature, rather than an individual. They are a perfect microcosm of the
macrocosm. Human beings in their microcosmic world seek a pattern and
order and face a natural chaos of existence in their struggle with the world
and with the being. Golding attempts to bring back the sense of unity,
undifferentiated consciousness of human beings without being reductive
like Marx, Freud or Darwin and attempted to scrape the labels off things, to
take nothing for granted, and to show the irrational where it exists.
Structuralist Golding accepts the inter relationship of the structural world
but he has moved beyond the limitations. Neither has he deconstructed to
undermine his own philosophy. Fictional world is his plying between the
Scylla of postmodernist fluidity and Charybdis of the deconstructionist’s
unending deferral. The answer to beyond the binaries is: a continuous
process of doing against undoing, knowledge against ignorance. It goes
beyond the structuralism’s binary opposition to philosophical ‘monism';
dualism is on the apparent level. Golding has sprinkled fresh water on
existing unity amid perceptual variations. The process itself is a signifying
system that has to move on and on in different cloaks in different time
toward a great chain of being.
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---.
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---.
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